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The History 



OF THE 



English Language 



FROM THE 



TEUTONIC INVASION OF BRITAIN 



TO THE 

I 



CLOSE OF THE GEOKGIAN EEA. 



BY 

HENRY E. SHEPHERD, 

Frofessor of the English Language and English Literature, 
Baltimore City College. 



NEW YORK: 

E. J. HALE & SON", PUBLISHERS, 
Murray Street. 

1874. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 
E. J. HAL'S & SON, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Lange, Little & Co., 

PRINTERS, ELECTROTYPERS AND STEREOTYPERS. 

108 to 114 W-ooster Street, N. Y. 



PREFACE. 



This work is a History of the English Language, not a 
history of English Literature. Its design is to trace the 
growth and formation of our tongue, the influences that 
have affected its development, or have impressed upon it 
certain characteristics. All purely literary criticism is 
therefore irrelevant, except so far as it may tend to illus- 
trate the peculiarities of the language, or to explain its 
apparent anomalies and its complexities. The book con- 
tains the substance of the Lectures delivered to the ad- 
vanced classes in English in the Baltimore City College 
during the past three years, and is intended for the 
purposes of instruction in Colleges, High Schools, and 
Academies, as well as to meet the want&.of general read- 
ers. The necessity for some work similar in design to 
the present must be obvious to all teachers of the English 
language in the United States. The want of suitable 
text-books constitutes one of the most serious obstacles 
with which the magnificent and rapidly expanding science 
of English Philology has to contend upon this side of the 
Atlantic. 



4 PKEFACE. 

It is but just to acknowledge in grateful terms the as- 
sistance derived from many excellent treatises, English, 
German, French, and American. Especial acknowledg- 
ment is due to the admirable publications of the Early 
English Text Society, and the Clarendon Press Series. 
"With these remarks, the work is submitted to the con- 
sideration of teachers and of all persons desirous of 
promoting the scientific study of the English Language 
in the United States. 



CONTENTS. 



introduction: 

PAGE 
THE ARYAN OR INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES 9 

CHAPTER I. 

ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. A. D. 449-A. D. 106 J 19 

CHAPTER II. 

THE NORMAN CONQUEST 32 

CHAPTER III. 

THE INFLUENCE OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST UPON THE 

. ANGLO-SAXON TONGUE 40 

CHAPTER IV. 

TRANSITION OF SAXON INTO ENGLISH 49 

CHAPTER V. 

THE WORKS OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD 55 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 63 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE — (continued) 72 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PIERS, THE PLOWMAN 78 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE WYCLIFFITE VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPTURES 84 



6 CO^TEKTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER X. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 89 

CHAPTER XI. 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWER 94 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWER — {continued) 98 

CHAPTER XIII. 

THE PRONUNCIATION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE AGE 

OF CHAUCER 106 

CHAPTER XIY. 

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 112 

CHAPTER XV. 

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE — {continued) . . 128 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM CHAUCER TO CAXTON. A. D. 

1400-1474. 140 

CHAPTER XVII, 

THE INFLUENCE OF PRINTING UPON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 143 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE 
SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH. 

1500-1558 ; 148 

CHAPTER XIX. 

THE FORMATION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH 155 

CHAPTER XX. 

ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH 165 

CHAPTER XXI. 

THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 1580-1625 173 



CONTENTS. 7 

PAGE 

CHAPTER XXII. 

THE TRANSLATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 181 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE CHANGES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE SINCE THE ELIZA- 
BETHAN ERA 185 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE CLOSE OF THE ELIZA- 
BETHAN ERA TO THE RESTORATION, 1625-1660 190 

CHAPTER XXV. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DURING THE RESTORATION. 1660- 

1685 195 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE CLOSE OF THE ERA OF 
THE RESTORATION TO THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN ANNE, 

1685-1702 202 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN 

ANNE TO THE DEATH OF DR JOHNSON. 1702-1784 213 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE DEATH OF DR. SAMUEL 
JOHNSON (1784) TO THE CLOSE OF THE GEORGIAN ERA 

(1830) 222 



INTRODUCTION. 



THE ARYAN OR INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. 

The languages of the Aryan* or Indo-European family 
may be divided into the following classes : The Sanskrit 
and its dialects, the Persian or Tranic, the Greek, the 
Latin, the Gothic or Teutonic, the Sclavonic, the Lithu- 
anian, and the Celtic. The former of these designations 
is a term of comparatively recent introduction into the 
science of language, and is probably derived from the 
primitive home of the race, Arya, the central highlands 
of Asia. The word, according to some etymologists, is 
related to the Latin root ar, to plough (arare\ old Eng- 
lish ear : Piers Ploughman's Vision ; Genesis, 45th chap. ; 
Shakspere, Richard II. ; and is indicative of the agricul- 

* Judging from the evidence of language, the Aryan tribes seem 
to have made considerable progress in civilization before their migra- 
tion from their original home. The words pertaining to peaceful 
occupations are the same in most of the dialects of this family, 
while those relating to the chase and to warlike employments are 
different. Terms in familiar use, some of which indicate a condi- 
tion of society decidedly advanced beyond mere barbarism, are the 
same in most languages of this class. Such, for example, are the 
words for king, door, plough, daughter, mother, father, son, sister, 
father-in-law, son-in-law, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in- 
law, the words for clothing, weaving, sewing, and the numeral sys- 
tems from ten to a hundred. 

i* 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

tural habits of those to whom it was applied. The term 
Aryan does not appear to have met w T ith general accept- 
ance, and it is perhaps liable to objection, as its applica- 
tion is restricted almost entirely to one branch of the 
linguistic family, the Persian, and does not assign to the 
others their proper degree of importance. The latter 
designation (Indo-European) is intended to point out the 
territorial position and the geographical connection of the 
races which speak the languages it represents. There 
have been various attempts made to assign some definite 
locality as the original home of the Indo-European or 
Aryan family. Such efforts, however, have resulted in 
ingenious speculations, and we have not even a plausible 
tradition which will assist us in forming a determinate 
and satisfactory conclusion. There can exist no reason- 
able doubt, however, that, at a period antecedent to 
authentic history, the Indo-European race constituted 
one community or society; associated by the natural 
and easy ties of a common language and a common 
faith. We are not in this regard so destitute of evi- 
dence, for the absence of historic testimony is to a 
considerable degree compensated by the proof s of linguis- 
tic relationship, which all the dialects of this widely 
extended family present. In some instances the resem- 
blance is clear and well defined ; in others the lineaments 
are marred, and almost effaced ; but whenever subjected 
to the rigid test of scientific comparison, the blurred out- 
lines reveal their primitive identity and ancient kinship. 
Let us now examine in detail the dialectic divisions 
of the Indo-European languages. At a period an- 
terior to the rise of history, the different tribes began 
their migrations towards the West. It is commonly as- 
sumed that the Celtic migrations preceded the others, 






INTRODUCTION. 11 

but this hypothesis rests upon no more substantial basis 
than the confused and inconsistent legends transmitted to 
us by these tribes. From the earliest times, Germany is 
inhabited by the Germans. This much at least seems 
probable, that the Sclavonic was the last branch that 
wandered far to the West. The Sclavonians retain 
nearly the same area which they at first occupied, and it 
is within a comparatively recent period that they have 
begun to acquire the elements of civilization. Of the 
different classes into which the Indo-European or Aryan 
family is divided, the Gothic or Teutonic class possesses 
for the student of the English language an immediate 
value, and demands careful investigation. Its dialectic 
divisions are : First, The Germanic, which is again di- 
vided into the Moeso-Gothic, the Old Saxon, the Low 
German, the Dutch, including the Flemish, the Frisic, and 
the High German. Second. The Scandinavian branch, 
which comprehends the Icelandic, the Swedish, the 
Danish, and their parent, the old Norse. 

The Moeso-Gothic (Gothic of Moesia) is the oldest rep- 
resentative of this branch. Early in the fourth century, 
one division of the great Gothic family settled in Moesia, 
became subject to the Roman government, and was con- 
verted to Christianit} 7 . Ulfilas, their famous bishop, 
who was identified with the sect of Arius, translated the 
Scriptures into Gothic for the benefit of his countiymen, 
a design displaying remarkable boldness and power, as 
the influence of the classic languages was then predomi- 
nant, and no others were deemed worthy or capable of 
literary culture. The Low German comprehends many 
dialects in common use in the low country, or northern 
parts of Germany. The Frisic occupied nearly the same 
territorial area with the Old Saxon, the coasts and 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

islands of the North Sea. The Frisic exhibits a marked 
resemblance to the English. The Dutch has been spoken 
in Holland since the thirteenth century, although its lit- 
erary pre-eminence dates from the sixteenth. The Flem- 
ish, in the thirteenth century, was the speech of the court 
of Flanders, and has its own records ; it is now almost 
entirely supplanted by the Dutch. The Old Saxon was 
the principal dialect of Northern Germany, between the 
Rhine and the Elbe. It is preserved to us in the Heli- 
and, or Saviour, a work which must be referred to the 
ninth century. The term Old Saxon is used to distin- 
guish the language of the Continental tribes from that 
spoken by the Teutonic invaders of Britain, after their 
conquest of that country. There is no Continental lan- 
guage to which Anglo-Saxon can be affiliated. It accords 
most nearly with the Frisic. But it is most probable 
that it was indigenous in England, being formed by 
the gradual blending of the many Teutonic dialects in- 
troduced by'the various Germanic invaders, the British 
tribes, and the Romanized inhabitants w T ho spoke the 
Lingua Rustica Romana, in various corruptions. The 
High German is the language of learning and literature 
in Germany, and has been so since the reign of Charle- 
magne. Its complete ascendency, however, dates from 
the Reformation, and the translation of the Bible by 
Luther. 

At the beginning of the great religious revolution in 
the sixteenth century, there prevailed in Germany the 
same discordance and variety of dialects which existed 
at the era of the Saxon conquest of England. Since the 
introduction of Christianity, several of the Germanic 
idioms had asserted their claims to literary pre-eminence. 
The Alemannic, Frankish, and Bavarian tongues had each 



IKTKODUCTIOK. 13 

become the medium of literary effort ; then the Swabian 
dialect acquired the superiority, and it still contains 
some of the most cherished memorials of German hero- 
ism. The language of Luther, acquiring an intensified 
force from the invention of printing, and the impulse 
communicated to theological investigation by the revival 
of classical literature, permeated every part of the coun- 
try, and became the general medium of all grades of 
society. This language was not the idiom of any dis- 
trict or any class, but one which had already established 
a just claim to be regarded as a literary speech, since 
it constituted the official language of the most impor- 
tant principalities in Southern and Central Germany. 
It was universally acknowledged as the language of liter- 
ature and learning, and since that period its ascendency 
has been undisputed. Whatever dialectic peculiarities 
may exist among the uneducated, those who control the 
intellectual forces of Germany, those who compose the 
refined and educated classes, speak and write nothing else. 

The High German may be divided into. three epochs; 
the present or New High German, which dates from the 
time of Luther; the Middle High German, extending 
back from Luther to the twelfth century ; the Old High 
German, extending back to the ninth century. 

The earliest literary memorials of the Scandinavian 
branch come to us from Iceland, where Christianity exer- 
cised a more conservative influence than in Germany, and 
did not destroy the ancient historic and religious move- 
ments. These are the two Eddas, which are both valuable 
on account of their antiquity, being the oldest productions 
of Norse literature, as well as on account of the informa- 
tion they convey respecting the primitive condition of the 
Germanic race. The Icelandic preserves most closely 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

the primitive Scandinavian type. The Norwegian, the 
Danish, and the Swedish, are cultivated languages, the 
Norwegian bearing the nearest relationship to the ancient 
JSTorse tongue. The others are descended from more an- 
cient dialectic divisions of Scandinavian speech. 

The Celtic branch consists of two divisions : First, the 
Gaelic, comprehending the primitive language of Ireland, 
the language of the Scottish Highlanders,* and the Manx 
of the Isle of Man. Second, the Cymric, the speech of 

* The Scottish dialect (Lowland Scotch) spoken in the southern 
parts -of Scotland, is entitled to a recognition in our classification of 
languages. This is an Anglo-Danish dialect, formed chiefly by the 
admixture of Anglian or Germanic elements (the Angles, in their 
original occupation of Britain, having spread extensively over the 
Lowlands of Scotland, as the Danes did afterwards), and Danish or 
Scandinavian forms, and containing very few Celtic words. After 
the conquest of England by the Normans, many of the expatriated 
Saxons took refuge in Scotland, and thus considerably increased the 
Germanic population that had already been established between the 
Tweed and the Forth. The kings of Scotland received these exiles 
with especial distinction, and promoted them to positions of dignity 
and honour. The same generous hospitality was accorded to men of 
Norman race, who were dissatisfied with their share in the distribu- 
tion of the spoils, or who had been expelled from England by the 
decree of the conqueror. These banished or discontented Normans 
resorted to the court of Scotland, where they were received into ser- 
vice, and invested with important military commands. The Scottish 
monarchs, in order to render their court more attractive to their 
Norman guests, endeavoured to engraft upon the Teutonic dialect 
already spoken there, many French terms, and French constructions. 
These foreign idioms were gradually naturalized in the region south 
of the Forth, and the national language of that part of the country 
soon became an equal admixture of Germanic, Scandinavian, and 
Norman French. The Scottish dialect is rapidly hastening to decay ; 
before the end of the present century it will probably be confined to 
the humble and uneducated classes. A hundred years ago it was cur- 
rent among the higher ranks of society, and at the beginning of the 
present century it was intelligible to every one. Its literary ascendency 
was destroyed at the Keformation, as no Scottish version of the 



IKTKODUCTIO^. 15 

the Welsh, the Cornish, which is now extinct, and the 
Armorican or Breton, spoken in the province of Brittany, 
the ancient Arraorica. 

Of the Indian division, the most important is the Sans- 
krit, a language which flourished several centuries before 
the age of Solomon, and which exhibits a striking resem- 
blance to English, some of the most useful vocables being 
almost identical in each language. For more than two 
thousand years Sanskrit has ceased to exist as a spoken 
idiom, and it is now employed as the official language 
of the priesthood, as the medium of literature, and is 
taught in the Brahmanic schools. Its most valuable memo- 
rials are the four Vedas, the Brahmanic Scriptures. Its 
lineal descendants are the Prakit and Pali dialects, which 
in their turn were succeeded by the languages now spoken 
in Hindostan ; the Hindostani ; the Bengali ; and Mara- 
thi. The varying dialects of the Gypsies are manifestly 
related to the Indian family. 

The Persian or Iranian class includes, First, the 
Zend, preserved in the Avesta, or Zend Avesta, 
the sacred writings, and its home is supposed to 
have been the country known as Bactria ; Second, the 

Scriptures was ever authorized. John Knox and his associates were 
accused of Anglicizing in their language as well as in their politics, 
and Ninian Winzet, the Popish antagonist of Knox, was the last 
who wrote the language in its purity. The union of the crowns, in 
the succeeding century, reduced Scotland to the condition of a mere 
province, but left it in possession of a noble literature, the product 
of two centuries which had intervened from Barbour to James VI., 
the last of the Scottish kings, and who may be considered the last 
of the Scottish poets in more senses than one. The Scottish dialect 
was formed under the same influences as the English ; its character- 
istics are familiar to the readers of Burns and Sir Walter Scott. 
Many of the difficulties of Shakspere's English receive their suc- 
cessful elucidation in this dialect. 



16 IOTKODUCTIOK. 

old Persian, which is found in the cuneiform inscriptions 
by which the conquerors of the East endeavoured to trans- 
mit the record of their achievements. Third, the modern 
Persian, which has been simplified by the loss of its in- 
flections, and has received large accessions of Arabic 
words. 

To this class may also be referred the language of the 
Kurds, the Afghans, and the ancient and the modern 
Armenians. The cultivated dialectic varieties of ancient 
Greek were the iEolic, the Ionic, the Doric, and the 
Attic. The Attic, by superior culture, attained the pre- 
eminence, and became the general speech of cultivated 
society. The Greek was succeeded by the Romaic or 
modern Greek, which has experienced a simplification 
of structure somewhat similar to that of Anglo-Saxon in 
its transition into English. The Latin, in the classic 
form in which it has descended to us, exhibits the dialect 
of books, and of the educated .Romans from about a cen- 
tury before the Christian Era. It was one of a number 
of Italian dialects, over which it gradually acquired the 
ascendency. Its modern descendants, the Romance (Ro- 
man) languages, are the Italian, the Spanish, the Portu- 
guese, the Provencal, formerly the language of South 
France, Langue D'Oc, the French proper, formerly spo- 
ken in Northern France, Langue D'Oyl ; the Wallachian, 
spoken in the Turkish provinces of Wallachia and Mol- 
davia (northern Turkey), but largely interpenetrated with 
Sclavonic words ; the Catalan, spoken in Spain, and gen- 
erally classed as a dialect of the Spanish, though its lin- 
guistic position, is independent ; the Rhseto-Romanic or 
Roumansch, spoken in Southern Switzerland and around 
the head of the Adriatic Sea. The term Romance, as 
the designation of these languages, may be traced to the 



rNTTKODUCTIOI*. 17 

Lingua Rustica Romana or Popular Latin, upon which 
they are principally based. The oldest member of ihb 
Sclavonic family is the ancient Bulgarian, commonly 
known as the Church Sclavic, or Sclavonic, and still the 
sacred language of the Greek Church. The most widely 
diffused branch is the Russian, winch has two divisions, 
the Russian proper and the little Russian, the latter in- 
cluding the Servian, the Croatian, and Slavonian. The 
others are the Polish, the Bohemian, the Moravian, the 
Slovakian, the Sorbian, and the Polatian, spoken on the 
Elbe. The Polish language began to be cultivated in 
the fourteenth century, and it was at one time the 
vehicle of a flourishing literature, which perished with 
the extinction of Polish nationality. The Lithuanic or 
Lettic family includes the old Prussian formerly spoken 
in northeastern Prussia, and now superseded by the 
Low German. The Lithuanian and the Lettish are still 
in use among the inhabitants of the Russian and Prussian 
provinces along the Baltic Sea, but are rapidly yielding 
to the encroachments of the German and the Russian, 
and seem destined to speedy extinction. During the 
year 1871 there was a decree issued by the Russian 
Government, prohibiting the use of the German, and 
prescribing the employment of the Russian within the 
Baltic provinces of Russia. The Indo-European or Aryan 
family is not restricted to a circumscribed area, but is 
exposed to the influence of other tongues, to some of 
which it is geographically related. In the present state 
of linguistic science the true position and relation of all 
the languages of Europe is not ascertained. 

The Etruscan, spoken in ancient Etruria (Tuscany), is 
still the puzzle of philologists ; the Basque, spoken on 
each side of the Pyrenees, is of Aquitanian and Iberian 



18 INTRODUCTION. 

origin. On its northern boundary the Aryan family 
touches the Turanian or Altaic class, comprehending the 
languages of the Manchoos, the Mongols, the Asiatic 
and the European Turks, the Magyars in Hungary, the 
Finns, and the Laplanders. On its southeastern frontier 
it comes into contact with the Dravidian or Tamulian 
group, spoken in the Deccan or southern part of the 
peninsula of India. In southwestern Asia it meets the 
Semitic class, including the ancient Hebrew, the sacred 
language of Israel, the Aramaic, spoken in Syria, Meso- 
potamia, Babylonia, and Assyria, and perpetuated chiefly 
in its two dialects, the Syriac and the Chaldee. The 
Aramaic was in common use among the Jews at the 
advent of Christianity, having been adopted by them 
during the Babylonish captivity for the purposes of lit- 
erary composition, as well as of conversation. It pos- 
sesses for us a peculiar interest, being the language 
which was spoken by our Lord and his disciples.* 

* For information respecting the other linguistic families of the 
earth, the student is referred to the excellent works of Prof. Max 
Miiller and Prof. Whitney. 



HISTORY 



OF THE 



English Language. 



CHAPTEE I. 

ANGLO-SAXON' PERIOD. A. D. 449-A. D. 1066. 

The Teutonic Invasions of Britain. The History of 
the English Language commences with the Anglo-Saxon 
invasions of Britain, about the middle of the fifth cen- 
tury of the Christian Era.* By the term Anglo-Saxon, 
we are not to understand any particular tribe or nation, or 
any definite number of tribes or clans. The word is 

* The commencement of the Germanic invasions of Britain was 
probably long anterior to the. middle of the fifth century of the 
Christian era. It was from this period that these invasions assumed 
a formidable' and organized character, but that the Germanic tribes 
had fo;ind their way into the island before this time is obvious from 
the following facts : " First. At the conclusion of the Marcomannic 
war, Marcus Antoninus transplanted a number of Germans into 
Britain. Second. Alemannic auxiliaries served along with Roman 
legions under Valentinian. Third. The Notitia Utriusque Imperii, 
of which tht latest date is half a century earlier than the epoch of 
Hengist, mentions as an officer of state, the Comes litoris Saxonici, 
per Britannias : his government extending along the coast -from 
Portsmouth to the Wash." — Latham. 



20 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

employed with the same latitude of meaning that we 
attach to the word Indians, and is merely a convenient 
designation of those Teutonic hordes which poured into 
Britain from about the middle of the fifth century to 
the middle of the sixth. The Celts, the original in- 
habitants of the island, were subdued but not extir- 
pated by the invaders, who became a powerful nation- 
ality, and called themselves Aenglisc or English; the 
country they called Aengla-land, the land of the Angles, 
or England. It is difficult to determine the nationality 
of the various tribes by which Britain was gradually 
colonized. The Anglo-Saxon tongue cannot be identified 
with any existing Continental speech, nor can the nation 
be traced to any particular tribes or clans whose names 
history has recorded. There is abundant linguistic evi- 
dence of a great blending of dialects and tribes in the 
body of invaders ; the Anglo-Saxon was not a harmo- 
nious or symmetrical language, but revealed even in its 
purest stages the diversity of elements which had entered 
into its composition. Its etymologies were defective in 
clearness, its syntax was discordant, its inflections lacked 
the regularity that characterizes the Latin. Every feature 
of the language indicated a diversity, not a unity of 
origin, and we may safely conclude that both language 
and people were formed by the fusion of many dialects 
and clans in proportions which cannot be accurately 
determined, and whose geographical position compre- 
hended all that part of Germany between the Bhine and 
the Eider, with the contiguous countries, Holland and 
Denmark. The Angles were probably of Danish origin, 
or at least Low German. They were thus related to the 
Jutes, who settled Kent and the Isle of "Wight. The 
large Scandinavian element among the conquerors of 



A^GLO-SAXOST PERIOD. 21 

Britain has not been noted with that degree of attention 
to which its importance entitles it. The presence of this 
infusion of Scandinavian blood is attested, First. By 
the Danish or Scandinavian vocables and constructions 
which the English language has retained. Second. By 
the numerous Runic monuments that have been dis- 
covered in Scandinavia and in England, while none have 
been brought to light upon German soil. 

The Angles spread themselves over the north and east 
of England, and it is plausibly conjectured that the course 
of their conquests sustained some relation to their original 
position upon the Continent. The population of North- 
umbria, or the kingdoms north of the Humber, of East 
Anglia, and of Kent, may thus be assigned to the border- 
lands of Denmark and Germany.* This semi-Scandina- 
vian origin is corroborated by the vigorous and enterpris- 
ing spirit of the race, who have contributed powerfully to 
the development of English prosperity and greatness. 
The origin of the Saxons is not so.easily explained. Essex, 
Sussex, "Wessex, East Saxons, South Saxons, West Sax- 
ons, testify by their names to Saxon settlements. "From 
their strong nationality, which >earried them through so 
many wars, they seem to have been a people, and not a 
mere federation. From their language, from their sea- 
faring life, from their great aptitude for dyke-making, 
and from the distinct evidence of Procopius, who calls 
them Friesians, it would seem natural to refer them to 
the districts of Holland and North Germany, between 
the mouths of the Eider and the Rhine." The rela- 
tionship subsisting between the Saxons, Hollanders, and 
Friesians, is perhaps more strikingly illustrated by lin- 

* Pearson's " England in the Middle Ages." 



22 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

guistic evidence. Among all the tongues of Europe, 
none display so marked a resemblance to the English as 
the Hollandish or Dutch, the Low German, and the 
Friesian. This is rendered obvious by noticing the 
many points of resemblance in pronunciation and in 
vocabulary, which exist between the Friesian and the 
South-English, of which Anglo-Saxon constitutes the 
basis. 

The Saxons extended their dominion over the south 
and the west of the island, peaceably coalescing with 
the Angles in the east, from whom they were sepa- 
rated by no differences either in language or in civiliza- 
tion so marked as to prevent their harmonious blending. 
Thus all England passed into the possession of a new 
population, except the inaccessible northern and western 
portions. Mercia, or the March (boundary) country, 
formed the boundary line of the great nationalities 
which divided this fair land.* 

The Anglo-Saxon Language. 

From what has been said, it is evident that the Anglo- 
Saxon was a composite tongue, formed by the gradual 

* The settlements of Britain by the Germanic invaders are said to 
have occurred in the following order : 

First. Jutes, under Hengist and Horsa; who occupied Kent and 
ttie Isle of Wight and a part of Hampshire, in A. D. 449 or 450. 
Second. The first division of the Saxons, under Ella and Cissa, 
settled in Sussex in 477. Third. The second body of Saxons, under 
Cerdic and Cymric, in Wessex in 495. Fourth. The third body of 
Saxons in Essex in 530. Fifth. First division of the Angles in the 
Kingdom of East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and 
parts of Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire). Sixth. The second di- 
vision of the Angles in the kingdom of Beornicia (situated between 
the Tweed and the Frith of Forth), in 547. — Morris's Outlines of Eng- 
lish Accidence. 



A^GLO-SAXO^ PEEIOD. 23 

blending of many kindred dialects, principally introduced 
into the island between the middle of the fifth and the 
middle of the sixth century, with a copious infusion of 
Latin derived from the Romanized Britons. The Anglo- 
Saxon was an inflected or synthetic language, like the 
Latin and the Greek. Although at the epoch of its most 
flourishing literature, its rich inflectional system had been 
somewhat reduced by the action of sound decay, a result 
which may be partly attributed to the Danish invasions, 
it retained a full set of terminations and great freedom 
of arrangement. With respect to its grammar, it is suf- 
ficient to say that it had five cases — that the article, noun, 
adjective, and pronoun were declinable, having different 
forms for three genders and two numbers : the adjec- 
tive, as in German, had two inflections, the definite and 
the indefinite; the verb had four moods, the indicative, 
subjunctive, imperative, and infinitive, and but two 
tenses, the present or indefinite, used also as a future, and 
the past. There were also compound tenses in the active 
Voice, and a passive voice, formed, as in English, by aux- 
iliaries. ( The auxiliaries usually retained their force as 
independent verbs, and were not employed as mere in- 
dications of time, as in English. The Anglo-Saxon had 
ten forms for the article, five for the noun, and ten 
terminations for the positive degree of adjectives ; the 
irregular verbs had thirteen endings, without including 
the inflected cases of the participles, j 

In all the loftier attributes of speech the Anglo-Saxon 
was the peer of any of the cognate Gothic languages. 
Though inferior to the Icelandic in the mere devices 
of rhetoric, in metrical and rhythmical appliances, it was 
perfectly adequate to the expression of the varied neces- 
sities of humanity. Its native roots possessed a remark- 



24 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

able facility of composition and derivation, though the 
number of its primitive and simple words was so great 
that there was less occasion for composition than in most 
of the related languages. 

This characteristic, together with the mode of inflec- 
tion employed, will explain in a measure the large 
monosyllabic element existing in Anglo-Saxon, and con- 
sequently in English ; a peculiarity of our tongue which 
has been forcibly illustrated by the late Dr. Joseph 
Addison Alexander, of Princeton, in the sonnet here 
quoted. It will be observed that nearly every word is 
of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and that those consisting of 
two syllables are usually enunciated as one. 

Think not that strength lies in the big, round word, 

Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak. 
To whom can this be true who once has heard 

The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak, 
When want, or fear, or woe, is in the throat, 

So that each word gasped out is like a shriek 
Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange, wild note, 

Sung by some fay or fiend? There is a strength, 
Which dies if stretched too far, or spun too fine", 

Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length; 
Let but this force of thought and speech be mine, 

And he that will, may take the sleek, fat phrase, 
Which glows, but burns not, though it beam and shine, 

Light, but no heat — a flash, but not a blaze. 

The Anglo-Saxon language attained its pre-eminence 
during the reign of King Alfred (870-901). Under the 
fostering care of "this royal scholar, the speech of Wes- 
sex attained an ascendency among the dialects of Eng- 
land, similar to that which the Attic acquired among 
the dialects of Hellas. Wessex became the centre of 
culture, and its language advanced rapidly to the position 



ANGLO-SAXOX PERIOD. 25 

of a classic and dominant speech. The Anglian or 
Northumbrian dialect, which at one time contained the 
germs of a vigorous and hopeful literature, succumbed 
to the fearful desolations of the Danes, the destruction 
of the monasteries, and the consequent extinction of 
learning, and is lost to sight, until it reappears in the 
fifteenth century as the national speech of Scotland 
(Lowland Scotch). 

Under the reign of Alfred, the Danes are expelled, 
comparative security is restored, and the literary su- 
premacy passes over to the tongue of the West Saxons. 
In this language was composed the greatest and the most 
cultivated portion of Saxon literature. Its grammar is 
characterized by regularity and uniformity, and its vo- 
cabulary is not affected by Scandinavian or Danish terms. 
The development of the Northumbrian dialect was ar- 
rested by the causes already indicated ; hence its liter- 
ary memorials are few. It possesses inflections and 
words which are not contained in the Wessex dialect, 
and the number of Danish terms is very few. These 
are the two forms in which the Anglo-Saxon existed be- 
fore the Norman conquest, 1066. 

The literature of the Anglo-Saxons has exerted no de- 
termining influence either upon the form or the spirit of 
English literature. The English Language and English 
literature were new creations, and the latter has derived 
none of its distinctive features from Anglo-Saxon proto- 
types. The influence of Anglo-Saxon upon English is 
confined to the vocabulary and the grammar, and does 
not seriously affect the literature. Hence the discussion 
of its literary memorials is somewhat irrelevant in this 
work, the intention of which is to trace the growth of the 

English language, and not the history of English liter- 

2 



26 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

ature, except so far as it illustrates the mutations and 
vicissitudes of the tongue. The consideration of this 
subject properly pertains to prof essed treatises upon Eng- 
lish literature. 

The Anglo-Saxons never attained the loftiest excel- 
lence either in poetry or prose. The poetical composi- 
tions are generally of a religious character, and, while 
destitute of inventive or creative power, are pure and 
elevated in tone and sentiment, though pervaded by that 
exuberance of metaphor, and gorgeousness of imagery 
which characterize the early literature of every^people. 
Metre* and rhyme were not essential features of their 
versification, though both were occasionally employed, 
and the introduction of rhyme into English poetry dates 
from Anglo-Saxon times. The distinctive- feature of 
Anglo-Saxon poetry was alliteration, which it possessed 
in common with the Old Northern or Icelandic. The 
rule which determined its employment, stated in general 
terms, is as follows: "In each couplet, three emphatic 
words (or by poetic license accented syllables), two in 
the first line, and one in the second, must commence 
with the same consonant, or with vowels, in which case 
the initial letters might be, and generally were, differ- 
ent." 

The following lines will illustrate the nature of allit- 
eration, both in vowels and consonants : 

.Pilgrymes and £>almeres, 
.Plighten hem togidere, 

* The metrical system of the Anglo-Saxons was probably affected 
by the influence of Icelandic models, as it possesses some metrical 
features in common with the Icelandic. For example, the Icelandic 
tended to break down the Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and thus to pre- 
pare the way for the introduction of rhyme. 



ANGLO-SAXO^ PEKIOD. 27 

For to seken seint Jame, 

And seintes at Rome. 

They wenten forth in hire wej, 

With many wise tales, 

And hadden feve to Zyen, 

Al hire Hi after. 

These lines are specimens of alliteration upon a 
vowel : 

And ^nobedient to ben underdone 
Of any lif lyvynge, 
With mwit and with outwit 
.Fmagynen and studie. 

In historical composition, the Anglo-Saxons appear to 
have been remarkably deficient, presenting in this regard 
a strange contrast to their brilliant Norman successors, 
who treasured up the records of their ancestral greatness 
with the same zealous guardianship that the Greeks and 
Latins cherished the legends of heroes and demi-gods. 
The Anglo-Saxon chronicle, which terminates A. D. 1154, 
is a monotonous recital of unimportant incidents, devoid 
of constructive skill, or graphic delineation. The genial 
climate and generous soil of Angleland enervated the 
martial spirit of the Teutonic barbarians ; and after they 
had subdued the Kelts, the primitive inhabitants, they 
lapsed into inglorious quietude, rarely rousing themselves 
to vigorous effort, except when called upon to repel 
the aggressions of Scandinavian hordes. With the 
death of Alfred, the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon 
commonwealth began to wane, literature declined, 
social and artistic culture deteriorated, and only the 
infusion of a vigorous and buoyant civilization could 
avert the doom that seemed impending over the Saxon 



28 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

State. Whence this restoring element was to come we 
shall learn hereafter. 

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, the Bo- 
mans, who had held the island since the reign of Yes- 
pasian,* had been recently called away from this outpost 
of the Empire to the defence of their own capital 
against the formidable encroachments of the northern 
barbarians. Hence the country reverted to the pos- 
session of its ancient inhabitants, who enjoyed a brief 
interval of freedom before they were transferred to the 
dominion of their new sovereigns. There is no historical 
foundation for the prevalent opinion that the Kelts 
were gradually extirpated by their Saxon conquerours. 
The large number of familiar terms in the vocabulary 
of the English language, of Keltic origin, the names of 
rivers, mountains, hills, and towns, which have descend- 
ed from the same source, ought effectually to dispel the 
popular impression that the Keltic nation was entirely 
exterminated by the Teutonic tribes. The Saxon con- 
quest was rather conservative than destructive in its 
tendencies. The maritime life of the Saxons naturally 
inclined them to the sea, and con|pquently we discover 
that the largest Saxon settlements are found in maritime 
districts. For a long time the Saxons were averse to 
city life, and restricted themselves to those regions 
which the sea washes. Still a certain degree of contact 



* The Roman invasions of Britain were commenced by Julius 
Caesar, B. C. 55. His invasion accomplished no substantial result, 
and it was not until repeated contests, continued during several 
reigns, that the island was rendered subject to Rome. The con- 
quest was completed under the beneficent administration of Agri- 
cola, A. D. 78-86. The Roman legions were finally withdrawn in 
the reign of Valentinian, A. D. 447. 



A^GLO-SAXO^ PERIOD. 29 

and admixture with the native population was inevitable. 
" If the Roman towns in some cases fell into decay, the 
poverty of a war-stricken people, the decline of com- 
merce and of the arts, will account for it. But the days 
of the great Roman feasts were still celebrated under 
Christian titles, the Roman colleges of trade were con- 
tinued as guilds. Roman local names were preserved 
by the conquerours, as they found them. Roman titles, 
duke and count, were assumed by the Saxon chiefs. 
Roman law has formed the basis oi the Saxon family 
system, and of the laws of property. The Saxon con- 
quest was a change of the highest moment, no doubt, 
but it did not break up society ; it only added a new 
element to what it found. The Saxon State was built 
upon the ruins of the past."* 

The Saxons, however, were not permitted to enjoy in 
tranquil security the possession of their conquered terri- 
tory. About the beginning of the ninth century, 
commenced the fearful incursions of the Scandinavian 
pirates, who were the terror and the scourge of Europe, 
and from whose depredations immunity was generally 
secured by exorbitant ransom, or enormous concessions. 
One branch of the Northmen or Norsemen desolated 
the kingdom of Gaul, and obtained from that imbecile 
monarch, Charles the Simple, the cession of one of his 
fairest provinces, Neustria, known henceforth in history 
as Normandy, from its new inhabitants. Of them we 
shall have more to say directly, as they play a brilliant 
part in the history of the English language and the Eng- 
lish race. Another division sailed towards Angleland, 
and thus laid the foundations for the conquests of their 

* Pearson's " England in the Middle Ages." 



30 HISTOEf OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

kinsmen in the ages to come. This was the first great 
act of the Scandinavian races, in the drama of European 
history. 

The Danish invasions and occupations of England 
may be stated in the following order : 

In 787 the Northmen * appeared, and made an attack 
upon the coast of Dorsetshire. In 832 the Danes 
ravaged Sheppey in Kent. In 833 thirty-five ships 
came to Charmouth in Dorsetshire, and Egbert was de- 
feated by the Danes. In 835 the Welsh and Danes 
were defeated by Egbert at Hengestesdun. In 855 the 
Danes wintered in Sheppey. In 866 they wintered in 
East Anglia. In 868 they got into Mercia as far as 
Nottingham, and in 870 they invaded East Anglia. In 
871 the eastern part of Wessex was invaded by the 
Danes. In 874 the Danes entered Lincolnshire. In 876 
they made settlements in Northumbria. In 878 Alfred, 
King of Wessex, concluded a treaty with Guthrum, the 
Danish chief, and formally ceded to the invaders all 
Northumberland and East Anglia, the greater part of 
Essex, and the northeast of Mercia. In 991 the Nor- 
wegians invaded the eastern coast of England, and 
plundered Ipswich ; they were defeated at the battle of 
Maldon. Before 1000 the Danes had settled in Cumber- 
land. In 1013 Svein, King of Denmark, conquered 
England; and from 1013 to 1042 a Danish dynasty ruled 
over England. In 1012 the government reverted to the 
possession of the Anglo-Saxons, who retained it until 
the Norman Conquest, 1066. The free spirit of the- 

* The terms Northmen, Norsemen, or Scandinavians, are the 
general designations of the inhabitants of Scandinavia (Norway, 
Sweden, and Denmark), who at that time were called Danes, with- 
out distinction. 



ANGLO-SAXO^ PEKIOD. 31 

Danes exercised a salutary influence upon the political 
and social condition of the Saxon State. 

Under the paternal government of Canute, the Danish 
aristocracy coalesced with the Anglo-Saxon ; the differ- 
ence in language and race was not so great as to render 
union impossible, and when the government was restored 
to the Anglo-Saxons, upon the overthrow of the Danish 
power, those Danes who desired it retained undisturbed 
possession of their homes, and became subjects of the. 
Saxon rulers. 



CHAPTEE II. 

THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 

The battle of Hastings, fought October 14, 1066, 
transferred the kingdom of England to the government 
of William, Duke of Normandy, and his followers. We 
have already learned that the Normans were originally 
a branch of the great Scandinavian family to which the 
Danes belonged, and that in the tenth century they had 
wrested from the King of France one of his loveliest 
provinces. Henceforth their character undergoes an en- 
tire transformation. Laying aside their natural rude- 
ness, and discarding their Scandinavian dialect, they 
entered boldly upon that wonderful career which was to 
make them the foremost among the nations of mediaeval 
history. Possessed of a susceptible and versatile genius, 
they rapidly advanced from a condition of barbarism to 
comparative civilization and enlightenment. They read- 
ily acquired the speech of the land, a language formed 
by the decay and corruption of the Lingua Utistica, or 
popular Latin, the colloquial dialect of the Empire, which 
had been disseminated throughout the Roman provinces 
by the legionaries,- the tradesmen, and the colonists. In 
France it had assumed two separate forms, distinguished 
by the w T ord for yes in each tongue, a manner of desig- 
nating languages by no means uncommon in the Middle 



THE NORMAL CONQUEST. 33 

ages. These are known in history and in philology as 
the Langue D'Oc, or Provengal, the tongue of south 
France, once the favourite medium of the Troubadours ; 
the Langue D'Oyl, or northern French, with which the 
Norman French is identified. The river Loire may be 
considered the dividing line between them. The south- 
ern' French, or Langue D'Oc, exhibits a marked resem- 
blance to the dialects of Spain; the northern French, 
or Langue D'Oyl, which extends from the Loire to the 
boundaries of Flanders, differs in certain respects from 
the Langue D'Oc. First. It was of later origin, south- 
ern Gaul having been conquered at an earlier period by 
the Romans. Second. It contains a Germanic element, 
as by its geographical position it is brought into contact 
with the Gothic languages of Holland and Germany, 
and northern France was colonized by Teutonic tribes 
in the fifth century. This Germanic element is quite 
important. Third. It contains a Scandinavian element, 
as the Normans retained some of their original w r ords 
after they had abandoned their former tongue. Fourth. 
It has a number of Keltic words, some of which were 
introduced into England by the Normans, and are per- 
petuated in the English language. 

The northern French assumed several dialectic forms, 
determined by the phonetic tendencies of the different 
tribes and nationalities among whom it was spoken. 
These were the dialects of Picardy, of Normandy, of the 
Isle of France, and of Burgundy. They w T ere all origi- 
nally upon a footing of linguistic equality, but during the 
fourteenth century the speech of the Isle of France at- 
tained the pre-eminence, in consequence of the political 
ascendency acquired by those who spoke it, and became 

the standard or literary language. The others descended 

2* 



34 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

to the level of mere patois, or uncultivated dialects.* It 
is with the dialect of Normandy that we are directly 
concerned, as the literary French exercised no specific 
influence upon English until the reign of Edward HE 
The Norman French w r as, as we have already seen, a 
Franco-Roman dialect, formed from the rude Latin of 
Gaul, containing a strong German admixture, as well as 
a Scandinavian and a Celtic element. It w r as character- 
ized by great simplicity of form and structure, a feature 
which is conspicuously displayed in its preference for 
single vowels and single consonants. Its pronunciation 
is supposed to have borne a strong resemblance to that 
of Anglo-Saxon, which may perhaps serve to explain the 
fusion of two tongues so essentially different, a fkct un- 
paralleled in linguistic history. 

The Norman tongue was not totally unknown in 
England before the Conquest. This will appear from 
the following historical facts. We discover repeated in- 



* As patois and dialect will occur again in this work, and as they 
are used frequently as synonymous or convertible terms, it may be 
well to explain the difference before proceeding further. A dialect, 
properly defined, is one of several independent and equal forms of a 
language. In point of literary merit they may be peers. Thus, the 
speech of Burgundy, Picardy, Normandy, and the Isle of France 
were cognate and equal dialects of the Langue D'Oyl, until the last 
secured the ascendency, and the others sunk to mere patois. Dia- 
lects, accurately understood, exist in the earlier stages of a language, 
before superior culture or political predominance has elevated one 
tribe or nationality and its language above the others. Patois, then, 
are those unfortunate dialects which, excelled by their competitors 
in the struggle for literary honours, have become the speech of the 
peasant and the brogue of the rural districts. 

For accurate and detailed information upon these points, the stu- 
dent is referred to Brachet's " Historical Grammar of French ; " Lit- 
tre's " History of the French Language/' in his magnificent dictionary. 



THE NORMAL CONQUEST. 35 

stances of intercourse between the two countries before 
this time : First. The residence in England of Louis 
Outremer. Second. Ethelred II. married Emma, 
daughter of Richard, Duke of Normandy, and the two 
children were sent to Normandy to be educated. Third. 
Edward the Confessor possessed a peculiar predilection 
for the Normans ; during his reign the offices of state 
were filled by Norman favourites ; the Norman tongue 
was cultivated in England, and French manners and 
customs became fashionable among the higher circles. 
He has been appositely called the first of the Norman 
monarchs of England. Fourth. Ingulphus, of Croydon, 
speaks of his knowledge of French. Fifth. Harold, the 
last of the Saxon kings, spent some time in Normandy 
with William. Sixth. William of Normandy visited 
England, and was received with all the splendor of a 
king by Edward. Seventh. The French article la, in 
the term la Drove, occurs in a deed of A. D. 975. 

The Norman Conquest removed England from her 
isolated position, and introduced her into the sphere of 
Continental relations. It appears to have been the uni- 
form policy of the Conquerour to leave the existing laws 
and institutions unaltered, and content himself with 
their rigourous enforcement. Notwithstanding the pro- 
scriptive and vindictive spirit by which some of his meas- 
ures were actuated, his administration was attended 
w T ith substantial benefits, and succeeded in effecting a 
political unity hitherto unknown in England. The 
character and condition of English society experienced 
a total transformation. The Normans constituted but a 
small proportion of the population, and they never trans- 
ferred themselves generally or in a body to England. 
But their political and social predominance, more than 



36 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

counteracted their limited numbers ; they rapidly ac- 
quired all positions of honour and emolument, in church 
and state. Norman prelates supplanted the Saxon bishops, 
the avenues to honour and distinction were closed against 
all but the adherents of the Conquerour, and no man 
could attain to eminence except by becoming, in speech 
and in .manners, a Frenchman. The native language and 
literature, which had been deteriorating since the age of 
Alfred, fell into neglect and decay ; excluded from the 
schools, from the church, from elegant and courtly cir- 
cles, it rapidly declined, though it never ceased entirely 
to be cultivated, during the long period of its depression 
that intervened between the Conquest and the time of 
Chaucer. It remained the vernacular tongue of the 
people, who cherished it all the more ardently on account 
of its misfortunes, and in the cloisters of the Saxon 
monks it was guarded with assiduous care, and preserved 
from utter literary extinction. 

Its productions were naturally imperfect ; nearly all 
of our Anglo-Saxon literature, from the Conquest to the 
time that it was kindled into life under the inspiration 
of Chaucer, consists of translations and paraphrases, a 
circumstance which forcibly indicates the absence of 
original genius, and literary patronage. The decline of 
Saxon letters and learning had commenced before the 
Conquest. It is true that this event greatly accelerated 
the process, but it was not the original cause. When the 
Normans invaded England, the Anglo-Saxons were re- 
duced to the lowest degree of ignorance and illiteracy. 

Odericus Yitalis, a native of England, and almost 
contemporary with the events he describes, speaks of his 
countrymen as having been found by the Normans, " a 
rustic and almost illiterate people," a remark which ap- 



THE NOKMAN COKQUEST. 37 

plies especially to the clergy, as the great body of the 
iaity were everj'where illiterate. The Conquerour took 
advantage of this prevailing ignorance of the clergy to 
deprive many of them of their benefices, and to supply 
their places with Norman favourites, many of whom were 
accomplished scholars. 

Upon the whole, it cannot be affirmed that the Nor- 
man Conquest was unfavourable to the interest of learn- 
ing and of civilization. " William himself," says War- 
ton (History of English Poetry), "patronized and loved 
letters. He filled the bishoprics and abbacies of England 
with the most learned of his countrymen, who had been 
educated at the University of Paris, at that time the 
most flourishing school in Europe. He placed Lanfranc, 
Abbot of the monastery of St. Stephen, at Caen, in the 
See of Canterbury — one of the most eminent logicians 
of that age. Anselm, an acute metaphysician and theo- 
logian, his immediate successor in the same See, was called 
from the government of the Abbey of Bee in Normandy." 
The speculations of these eminent dialecticians had 
" almost reconstructed philosophical opinion in Europe." 
William and his nobles founded and endowed some of 
the most magnificent institutions of learning in Eng- 
land, and he patronized liberally all enterprises designed 
to promote the interests of culture, -or to foster and de- 
velop a love for letters. He set the example himself, by 
educating his own son, Henry Beauclerc, with the utmost 
care, in all the sciences known and studied in this age 
of comparative ignorance. Many of his successors 
manifested the same respect for learning ; many of them 
had received the most thorough education which was 
then afforded. Still, whatever learning existed, was in 
a great degree the exclusive possession of the clergy, and 



38 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

but few even of the nobility seem to have been versed 
in the scholarship of the age. The Latin tongue, which 
was then the general medium of all knowledge, was un- 
known except to the clergy, and to such of the laity as 
had embraced the profession of teaching. 

There long existed a prevalent misapprehension that 
the Norman Conquerour endeavoured to force upon his 
new subjects the language of Normandy, and thus to 
effect the total abolition of the Saxon speech. Hume 
tells us that "the Conquerour entertained the difficult 
project of abolishing the English language, and for that 
purpose he ordered that, in all schools throughout the 
kingdom, the youth should be instructed in the French 
tongue. The pleadings in the supreme court of judica- 
ture w T ere in French, the deeds were drawn in the same 
language, the laws were composed in the same idiom." 
This statement must be received with decided modifica- 
tions. It is true that French was the language of the 
court and of genteel society from infancy ; that boys in 
the grammar schools were taught to translate and con- 
strue their Latin into French ; and so fashionable had the 
use of it become that even rustic and uncouth persons 
endeavoured to speak French, in order " to be thought 
something of," into such neglect and contempt had the 
Saxon speech fallen. The mass of the people, however, 
adhered pertinaciously to their native speech. With 
regard to the remainder of this assertion, so general in 
its character, it may be said that later and more accurate 
historical researches have shown that there is no one 
example of any pleadings in the court of judicature in 
French, of any deeds or charters drawn in the same 
language, or any laws composed in that idiom, until the 
reign of Henry III. " What William found he kept ; 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 39 

like his predecessors, his charters were written either in 
English or Latin, though the latter gradually prevailed. 
Yet the English continued in constant use, and the last 
example of its employment is found also in the reign 
of Henry III., when we had the first employment of 
the French tongue. * * * * No doubt the Ro- 
mance dialect prevailed greatly in England in later 
times, but for this we cannot hold William responsi- 
ble, and every letter, every writ, every missive which 
he addressed to his trusty men — his Frenchmen or 
his Englishmen — was in Latin or in English. It was 
not until the conclusion of Henry IIL's reign that 
the Norman-French appears in the monuments of 
our jurisprudence and diplomacy."* He even under- 
took to learn the language of his Saxon subjects, in 
order that he might be qualified to decide suits at 
law, to which they were parties. The difficulty of the 
undertaking, however, induced him to abandon it ; the 
Norman lords could not acquire the correct pronuncia- 
tion of Saxon words, they mutilated its local names,f and 
their sovereign probably experienced the same difficulty. 
There is no historical evidence whatever for the asser- 
tion so frequently* repeated, that the Norman Conquer- 
our designed the destruction of the Saxon tongue; such 
a result would have been unattainable except by the ex- 
tirpation of the race who spoke it ; and the decline and 
neglect of Saxon speech and Saxon letters were rather 
accelerated than directly produced by the Conquest; 
they did not proceed from deliberate policy, or royal in- 
terdiction ; the same result was inevitable in any event, 
even if* the Normans had never set foot in England. 

* Palgrave's " England and Normandy. " 

f For example, they pronounced Lincoln, Nicole. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE INFLUENCE OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST UPON THE 
ANGLO-SAXON TONGUE. 



The decline of Anglo-Saxon speech and literature 
had commenced, as we have learned, long before the era 
of the Conquest. The first perceptible effect of Nor- 
man-French upon Anglo-Saxon was to impart a stimulus 
to that process of decomposition or phonetic decay * 

* Phonetic decay is that process of decomposition or disintegration 
which is ever active in language, but which is more violent in its 
operations at some periods than at others. It is produced by vocal 
relaxation, careless and indistinct pronunciation, such as we habitu- 
ally listen to, the slurring over or suppressing of syllables, the 
dropping of consonants between two vowels, the abbreviation and 
mutilation of long words, in order to avoid the trouble of enunciat- 
ing them clearly ; in a word, it comprehends all those expedients to 
which we unconsciously resort, in order to economize the breath ; it 
is the practical or utilitarian element in speech, and by its agency 
many of the most important transmutations of language have been 
effected.. Familiar examples of it are, don't for do not, shan't for 
shall not, can't for cannot, etc. The greater part of the changes that 
occurred in the transition of Saxon into English, are attributable to 
its agency. 

Thus : A 



• 



. S. hafoc in Engli 


sh became 


hawk. 


" daeg in " 


a 


day. 


" sprecan in 


ii 


speak. 


" morgen in " 


a 


morrow 


" cyning in " 


a 


king. 


" hlaford in 


a 


lord. 


" sselig in " 


tt 


silly. 



INFLUENCE OF THE NOKMAN CONQUEST. 41 

which had already begun to assail the integrity of the 
tongue, and to transmute it from an inflected or synthetic 
language to an uninflected or analytic speech. Had 
there been no Norman Conquest, it is probable that 
Saxon would have experienced a decided simplification 
of structure, such as nearly all the languages of the Low 
German stock have undergone. This had been already 
partially accomplished in the north and east of England 
by the influence of the Danish invasions. The inherent 
tendency of all languages to simplification of structure, 
would in the course of time have produced this result, 
but without the Conquest, it would have been much 
more gradual, and by no means so complete. The first 
perceptible change produced by the Conquest effected 
the orthography ; the vocabulary received no decided 
modification until a much later period. The JSTorman- 
French, for a century after the occupation of England, 
experienced no important change; its orthography and 
some of its forms were slightly altered, but it remained 
essentially unimpaired until a subsequent period. 

Latin, as was the case everywhere throughout Europe 
during the dark and middle ages, continued to be the 
dialect of the Church and of learning ; French the speech 
of the foreigners ; while the mass of the native popula- 
tion retained with invincible tenacity their vernacular 
tongue. The fact that it had ceased to be generally cul- 

A. S. wif-man in English became woman. 



" Eofor-wick in 

" hlsefdige in 

" bren-ston in 

" nawiht in 

" secgan in 

" angnsegele in 



York. 

lady. 

brimstone-burnstone. 

nouglit. 

say. [the nail. 

hangnail,— a sore under 



42 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

tivated, greatly facilitated the process of phonetic decay, 
and consequent simplification of structure. The con- 
servative influence of culture no longer restrained or 
retarded its action; the pronunciation became corrupt,, 
terminations disappeared, the constitution of the speech 
was infected with a malady which nothing could relieve 
but an entire reconstruction, or a transmutation of its 
form and character. There being no longer any gener- 
ally acknowledged standard of literary excellence, the 
language lost whatever uniformity it had once possessed, 
and the germs of dialectic divergence began to be de- 
veloped. The two idioms remained side by side without 
intermingling ; * a natural effect of the animosities 
and distrust which the Conquest had generated. Still 
the necessities of intercourse, however limited, between 
conquerors and conquered, gradually produced a kind of 
mixed dialect, composed of a blending of French and 
Saxon, and popularly known as " Marlborough French/' 
resembling the Lingua Franca of the Levant, or the 
slang of Anglo-Indian society, utterly confounding the 
two vocabularies, and disregarding grammatical forms.f 
Important to be noticed among the changes produced 
by French influence are the following : C before the 
Conquest was pronounced hard, like K. Its present soft 
s-sound, also the softened forms cA, sh, are due to the 
French influence : g is often changed to w and y, which 
is due to the same cause ; through the agency of the 

* For a considerable period after the Conquest, the French was 
probably principally spoken in the large towns and cities, in which 
the Normans mostly resided. The Anglo-Saxon prevailed generally 
in the villages, and in the rural districts, where comparatively few 
Normans congregated. 

f Pearson's " England in the Middle Ages." 



I^FLUE^CE OF THE NORMAL CONQUEST. 43 

French, the th, 3d person singular Indie. Pres., was 
gradually softened to s. Under the same influences, 
which was a favorite plural termination of French nouns, 
became the generally received sign of the plural in English. 
All the phenomena of linguistic history may be clas- 
sified under two heads : dialectic convergence, and dia- 
lectic divergence. The evolutions of language are con- 
fined to these processes of concentration and dispersion.* 
Thus, for example, one nationality or tribe secures a 
political ascendency, or excels its neighbours in literary 
culture, acquiring for its dialect a pre-eminence, as the 
standard of correctness, and the medium of literary com- 
position. The others, surpassed in the contest for the 
supremacy, sink down to mere patois. This is a case of 
dialectic convergence, and the dialects of Wessex and of 
the Isle of France may be cited as illustrations. If, on 
the other hand, the dialect which has attained the supe- 
riority, is by some internal convulsion, foreign conquest, 
or admixture, corrupted, disintegrated ; and finally, los- 
ing its stability, and uniformity of structure, resolves 
itself into several dialectic forms, we have an example of 
divergence. Such a divergence was effected by the 
breaking up of the ancient Latin into its different Ro- 
mance descendants; and by the gradual disruption of 
Anglo-Saxon produced by the Conquest, which caused the 
language in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth cen- 
turies, to resolve itself into three distinct varieties ; viz., 
the Northern, the Middle, and the Southern dialects, f 



* Whitney's "Language and the Study of Language.'' 
f The student will-find a lively and graphic description of these 
dialects in Trevisa's translation of Higden's " Polychronicon." 
Morris's " Specimens of Early English," page 338. The outline of 
the dialects given in the text, is condensed from Morris. 



44 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Their geographical area was as follows : The Northern 
dialect was spoken throughout the Lowlands of Scotland, 
Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire. The Mid- 
land dialect was spoken in all the Midland counties, in the 
East Anglian counties, and in Cumberland, Westmore- 
land, Lancashire, and Shropshire. The Southern dialect 
was spoken in all the counties south of the Thames, in 
Somersetshire, Gloucestershire, and in parts of Hereford- 
shire, and Worcestershire. These dialects may be distin- 
guished from one another by the employment of different 
grammatical forms. A convenient test for the illustration 
of these differences, is found in the inflection of the 
verb in the present plural indicative. 

The Southern dialect employs eth, the Midland en, as 
the inflection for all forms of the plural present indica- 
tive. The Northern dialect uses neither of these forms, 
but substitutes es for eth or en. The Northern dialect has 
its imperative plural in es j the Southern and Midland 
in eth. The Midland dialect being widely extended, 
had various local forms. The most marked of these are: 
the Eastern Midland, spoken in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, 
and Suffolk ; the West Midland, spoken in Cumberland, 
Westmoreland, Lancashire, Cheshire, and Shropshire. 
The East Midland conjugated its verb in the present 
singular indicative, like the Southern dialect. 
1st person, hop-0, I hope. 
2d " hope-s£, thou hopest. 
3d " hop-^A, he hopes. 

The West Midland, like the Northern, conjugated its 
verb as follows : 

1st person, hope. 
2d " lwp-es. 
3d " hop-&s. 



nSTFLUE^CE OF THE NORMAL CONQUEST. 45 

There are other points of difference to be noted. The 
Southern dialect frequently substituted v, where the 
others used/*, as winger = finger. It preferred the palatal 
ch to the guttural &, in many words; as ncA^= North- 
ern rilce = kingdom ; crouch = croke — cross. It often 
had 6 and u where the Northern dialect had d and i, as 
A^Z=Northera hil, pu t= Northern pit ; Jem = Northern 
ban=bone. In its grammar, the Southern dialect was 
still more distinctly marked. First. It preserved a large 
number of nouns with plurals in n, as sterren — stars, 
eyren=eggs, kun =kme. The Northern dialect had 
only about four of these plurals, viz. : eghen=ejes, 
hosen, oxen, and schoon=&ioe&. Second. It kept up the 
genitive of feminine nouns in e, while the Northern 
dialect employed only the masculine suffix s, as in mod- 
ern English. Third. Genitive plurals in ene are very 
common, but do not occur at all in the Northern dialect. 
Fourth. Adjectives and demonstrative pronouns retained 
many of the older inflections, and the definite article 
was inflected. Many pronominal forms were employed 
in South England, that were never used in the North. 
Fifth. Where the Anglo-Saxon had infinitives ending 
in an and ian, the Southern dialect had en or e and ie. 
This inflection does not occur in the Northern dialect. 
Sixth. Active participles ended in inde (ynde); in the 
North in ande {and). Seventh. Passive participles re- 
tained the old prefix ge (which was very common in 
Anglo-Saxon before the Conquest), softened down to i 
or y ; in the North it was never used. Eighth. It had 
many verbal inflections that w r ere unknown to the 
Northern dialect, as st (present and past tenses), en 
(plural past indicative) ; e (second person plural past 
indicative of strong verbs). Ninth. The Northern dia- 



46 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

lect had many plural forms of nouns that were wholly 
unknown to the Southern dialect, as brether= brethren, 
childer = children, he7id=hsnids. Tenth. That was used 
as a demonstrative pronoun, as in English, without refer- 
ence to gender. In the Southern dialect, that was often 
the neuter of the definite article. Eleventh. Same (as, 
the same, this same), was used instead of the Southern 
thilke, modern thuck, thick. Thir, ther (the plural of 
the Scandinavian article, the, these), w^as often used. 
Twelfth. The pronominal forms were very different. 
Thus, instead of the Southern lieo (hi, hii)==she, this dia- 
lect used sco, scho, the older form of our she. It rejected 
the old plural pronouns of the third person, and substi- 
tuted the plural article, as thai, thair, thaim (tham), 
instead of hi, (heo, hii), heore (here), heom (hem), 
yhoures, thairs, as common then as now, were unknown 
in the South of England. At=to, was used as a sign of 
the infinitive; sal and sud=schal and schuld. The 
Northern dialect had numerous Scandinavian forms ; as, 
hethen, hence = Southern hemic • thethen, thence = South- 
ern thenne / whethen, whence = Southern whennes. 

The East Midland dialect has one peculiarity that has 
not been found in the other dialects, viz : the coalescence 
of pronouns with verbs, and even with pronouns, as 
caldes = calde + es = called them ; dedes = dede -\-es- put 
them; hes—he + es=he+t\iem. The West Midland has 
its peculiarities, as A<9 = she, hit — its. 

For two or three centuries after the Conquest, the 
confusion and diversity of dialects, produced by the 
divergence of which we have spoken, was so great that 
no one could fairly claim to be considered the standard 
speech. 

The Midland dialect was the most widely extended/ 



INFLUENCE OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 47 

and the one which we might naturally expect would be- 
come the standard form of the language. Of its many 
varieties, the East Midland was by far the most important. 
As early as the beginning of the thirteenth century it be- 
gan to receive literary culture, and had lost most of its in- 
flections, so as to become a simple analytic speech, like 
modern English. This dialect, Anglo-Danian in origin 
and character, gradually penetrated further and further 
southward, and ended by supplanting the Southern dia- 
lect for the higher purposes of literary composition ; 
Trevisa (1387) being the last writer of eminence who 
employed it. The steady advance of this dialect from 
about a. d. 1180 until, in the hands of Wickliffe, Gower, 
and Chaucer, it attained the ascendency, is one of the 
great facts of our linguistic history.* In this dialect, not 

*In Puttenham's "Art of Poetry" (1589), Arber's "Reprints of 
Early English Authors/' the student will find some very instructive 
remarks concerning the English dialects. Puttenham mentions 
three dialects — the Northern, Western, and Southern. The North- 
ern was that spoken north of the Trent ; the Southern was that 
south of the Trent, which was also the language of the court, the 
capital, and the surrounding counties ; the Western occupied the 
same limits to which it is now confined, Gloucestershire, Somerset- 
shire, Wiltshire. " Our maker (poet) therefore at these dayes, shall 
not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, 
for their language is now out of use with us ; neither shall he take 
the termes of Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, 
whether they be noblemen or gentlemen, or of their best clarkes, 
all is a matter ; nor in effect, any speach used in England, beyond 
the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the 
purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so courtly nor so 
current as our Southerne English is, no more is the far Westerne 
man's speech ; ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the Court, 
and that of London, and the shires lying about London, within 
sixty miles, and not much above. I say not this, but that in every 
shire of England, there be gentlemen and others that speake, but 



48 HISTOKY OP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

only the works of Chaucer and his illustrious contempo- 
raries were composed, but also the Ormulum, and the 
writings of Robert of Brunne (1303), who clearly fore- 
shadows the future of the English Language, and the 
triumph of the East Midland speech. In his diction, 
the Romance and Teutonic elements are skilfully adjusted, 
and many modern idioms and familiar combinations ap- 
pear for the first time, so that he is not inaptly named 
the " Patriarch of the new English." In the age of 
Chaucer, the East Midland had become the speech of 
London and Oxford, and had probably penetrated south 
of the Thames into Kent and Surrey. At a subsequent 
date, the Southern dialect had so far receded before it, 
as to become rather Western than Southern, and the 
latter designation was the one applied to the languages 
which had been adopted as the standard. 
. ■ 

specially write, as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, 
but not the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen, 
and also their learned clarkes, do for the most part condescend, but 
herein we are already ruled by th' English dictionaries, and other 
books written by learned men.' 



CHAPTER IV. 

TRANSITION OF SAXON INTO ENGLISH. 

It has been stated in a preceding chapter, that pho- 
netic decay had made considerable progress in disin- 
tegrating the structure of the Saxon tongue, and in 
converting it from an inflected to an analytic language, 
before the Conquest imparted a new impulse to the pro- 
cess of decline, and essentially facilitated its completion. 
We must now consider in detail the progressive series 
of changes by which Anglo-Saxon lost its synthetic 
character, and was transmuted into our simple uninflected 
English. The first change which occurred, affected the 
orthography.* This may be seen in documents dating 
from the beginning of the twelfth century, and it con- 
sisted in a general weakening of the terminations of 
words. 

First. The older vowel endings #, o, u, were reduced 
to e. This modified the oblique cases of nouns and ad- 
jectives, as well as the nominative, so that the termina- 
tion 

became re. 
" ene. 



an became 


en. 


ra, ru 


as " 


es. 


ena 


ath " 


eth. 


on 


urn " 


en. 


od, ode 



" en. 



u 



ed, ede. 



* This outline of inflectional changes is condensed from Morris. 
It may be found in his " Specimens of Early English," or his " Out- 
lines of English Accidence." 

3 



50 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

G or Tc is often changed to ch soft, and g to w and y. 
These changes took place between a. d. 1100 and 1250. 
Between 1150 and 1200, we note the following changes. 
First. The indefinite article an, a, is formed from the 
numeral. It is often inflected. Second. The definite arti- 
cle becomes pe, peo, pe, {pat), instead of se, seo, past. It 
often loses the former inflections, especially in the femi- 
nine. We find pe often used as a plural instead of pa or 
po. Third. Nominative plurals of nouns end in en or e, 
instead of a or u, thus conforming to plurals of the n 
declension. Fourth. Plurals in es sometimes take the 
place of those in en {an), the genitive plural ends in ene 
or e, and sometimes in es. Fifth. The dative plural 
(originally u?n) becomes e and en. Sixth. Some uncer- 
tainty begins to appear in the gender of nouns. Seventh. 
Adjectives manifest a tendency to drop the following 
case endings : 1st, the genitive singular masculine of the 
indefinite declension. 2d, the genitive and dative fem- 
inine of the indefinite declension. 3d*, the plural en 
of the definite declension frequently becomes e. Eighth. 
The dual forms are still in use, though not so common. 
The datives him, hem, are used instead of the accusative. 
Ninth. New pronominal forms appear, as ha = he, she, 
they y is = her y is = them y me = one. Tenth. The n in 
min, thin, is often dropped before 'consonants, but re- 
tained in the plural, and in the oblique cases. Eleventh. 
The infinitive frequently drops the final n, as smelle = 
smellen, to smell. To is sometimes used as the sign of 
the infinitive. Twelfth. The gerundial or dative of the 
infinitive ends often in en or e, instead of enne (anne). 
Thirteenth. The n of the passive participle is often 
dropped. Fourteenth. The present participle ends in inde, 
and is often substituted for the gerundial infinitive, as, to 



TKANSITIOK OF SAXOK IKTO ENGLISH. 51 

swiminde = to swimene, = to swim. Fifteenth. Shall 
and will begin to be employed as auxiliaries of the 
future tense. The latter half of the twelfth century 
was a period of great confusion and diversity. The 
older forms existed side by side with the new ones that 
were struggling to supplant them, thus proving that 
the ancient inflections did not yield the supremacy with- 
out a vigorous contest. In this period, we first find the 
popular or provincial elements budding forth, many of 
which afterwards became recognized forms of speech. 

These changes occur principally in the Southern dia- 
lect. In the other dialects of this period (the East and 
West Midland) phonetic decay had wrought a more thor- 
ough simplification of grammatical structure. Thus, in 
the Ormulum, which is written in the East Midland dia- 
lect, we note these essential changes : First. The definite 
article is used as in modern English, and that is a demon- 
strative without regard to gender. Second. The gender 
of substantives, is nearly the same as at present. Third. 
es is commonly used as the sign of the plural. Fourth. 
es, singular and plural, has become the ending of the gen- 
itive or possessive. Fifth. Adjectives, as in the time of 
Chaucer, have a final e for the older inflections, but e is 
chiefly used, 1st, as a sign of the plural ; 2d, to distin- 
guish the definite form of the adjective. Sixth. The 
forms they, theirs, come into use. Seventh. Passive par- 
ticiples drop the prefix i {ge\ as, cumen for icumen. 
Eighth. The plural of the present indicative ends in en 
instead of eth. Ninth. Ar?i=are for heoth. In a work 
written before the middle of the thirteenth century, con- 
taining many forms belonging to the West Midland dia- 
lect, we find : First. Articles, nouns, and adjectives, as in 
the Ormulum. Second. The pronoun thai instead of hi 



52 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

or heo =they \ I for Ic or Ich. Third. Passive partici- 
ples frequently omit the prefix i. Fourth. Active par- 
ticiples end in ande instead of inde. In the conjuga- 
tion of the verbs we notice important changes : First. 
The substitution of es for est in the second person of 
weak or regular verbs. Second. The dropping of e in 
strong or irregular verbs. Between 1150 and 1250 the 
Norman-French begins to affect slightly the vocabulary 
of English. 

Changes between 1250-1350. 

First. The article still retains some of the older inflec- 
tions: as, the genitive singular feminine; the accusa- 
tive masculine ; the plural jpo (the nominative being used 
with all cases of nouns). Second. The confusion in the 
gender of nouns increases, words becoming neuter that 
were once masculine or feminine. In the course of 
time the language lost its grammatical gender, and 
neuter became the designation of objects without life. 
Anglo-Saxon had its arbitrary system of grammatical 
gender, like the other Aryan tongues, and the effacing 
of these perplexing and fictitious distinctions is one of the 
happiest changes effected by the Norman-French influ- 
ence. The change itself is directly due to the disap- 
pearance of the inflections, indicating the differences of 
gender and the consequent disappearance of the differ- 
ences themselves. Third. Plurals in en and es are used 
without distinction. Fourth. The genitive es becomes 
more general, and begins to supersede the older en and 
e in old masculine and neuter nouns, and e in feminine 
nouns. Fifth. The dative singular of pronouns begins 
to drop off ; mi-self and thi-sell are often substituted for 
meself and theself. Sixth. Dual forms of the personal \ 



TRAKSITIOST OF SAXOK IKTO ENGLISH. 53 

pronouns disappeared about the close of the thirteenth 
century. Seventh. A final e is used for the sign of the 
plural of adjectives, and for distinguishing between the 
definite and indefinite declensions. Eighth. The gerun- 
clial infinitive ends in en or e. Ninth. The ordinary 
infinitive takes the prefix to. Tenth. A few irregular 
verbs become regular. Present participles in inge ap- 
pear about the beginning of the fourteenth century. 
During this period, and especially towards its close, the 
French element begins to enter largely into the vocabu- 
lary of English. 

Changes between 1350-1460. 

During this period the Midland acquires the ascend- 
ency, and becomes the standard speech. Words from 
the Northern and Southern dialects retain their charac- 
teristic peculiarities. The following points should be 
noted with care : First. The plural article tho = the ; 
those, is still of frequent occurrence. Second. The es in 
plural and genitive case of substantives is mostly a sepa- 
rate syllable.* Third. The pronouns are /for the older 
Ic ; sche for the old form heo / him, them, whom, used 
as datives and accusatives; oaves, youres, heres, in com- 
mon use for oure, youre, here ; thei (they) in general 
use instead . of hi (heo) ; here = their, hem — them. 
Fourth. The plurals of verbs in the present and past 



* The sign of the English possessive, 's, is commonly referred to 
the ending of the Anglo-Saxon genitive, es or is. But the latter in- 
flection disappeared almost entirely during the period that we are 
now considering, and it is at least probable that our possessive sign, 
'#, is a new and distinct inflectional development such as languages 
sometimes put forth, even at times when their generative energy has 
apparently disappeared. 



54 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

indicative end in en or e. The imperative plural ends 
in eth / est is often used as the inflection of the second 
person singular preterite of strong and weak verbs. 
The infinitive ends in en or e, but this inflection often 
disappears * towards the end of the fourteenth century. 
The present participle ends usually in ing (inge). The 
passive participle of strong verbs ends in en or e. The 
termination e requires particular attention. It repre- 
sents an older vowel ending: na?n-e=na?n-a / or the 
termination an, en, as withute=withutan. It represents 
different inflections, and is used, 1st, as a mark of the 
plural or definite adjective ; 2d, as a mark of adverbs ; 
3d, as a sign of the infinitive mood, past tense of weak 
verbs, and imperative mood. About the close of this 
period, the use of final e becomes irregular and unsettled, 
and the forms of pronouns prevalent in the northern di- 
alect, their, theirs, them, are generally used in the others. 



CHAPTER Y. 

THE WORKS OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD. 

There are several works that have descended to us 
from the thirteenth century, which afford, as it were, a 
pictorial illustration of the process by which Anglo- 
Saxon gradually evolved itself from its rich inflectional 
dress, and assumed the simple and graceful drapery of 
our noble English. These works, though devoid of the 
loftiest excellence, or of mere literary attractions, are val- 
uable and interesting to the student of the English 
tongue, as serving to elucidate an important, and per- 
haps difficult era in its historical development. They 
therefore merit a somewhat detailed consideration. They 
are " Layamon's " Chronicle of Brutus ; " the " Ancren 
Riwle," the " Ormulum," and " Robert of Gloucester's 
Chronicle." The language of the first three of these 
may be termed semi-Saxon, or broken Saxon ; that of the 
last is English, and is the first acknowledged composi- 
tion in the English tongue. Except the " Ancren Riwle," 
they are all in verse, a form of language in which the 
early efforts of every literature are embodied. The 
work of Layamon " is a versified chronicle of the mythi- 
cal history of Britain and its ancient kings, dating from 
the destruction of Troj 7 , and the flight of JEneas, from 
whom descended Brutus, the founder of the British 
monarchy, and extending to the reign of Athelstan." 
The "Brat" or " Chronicle of Britain" is principally, 



56 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

though with many additions, a translation of the French 
u Brut D' Angleterre" of Wace, a French scholar, which 
was itself a translation, with considerable additions, of 
Geoffrey of Monmouth's " Latin History of the Britons," 
which is also a translation from a French or Welsh 
original. " So that the genealogy of the four versions 
is as follows : First, a Celtic original probably, now lost ; 
Secondly, the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth ; Thirdly, 
the French of Wace; Fourthly, the English of Laya- 
mon." The work of Layamon was written during the 
first half of the thirteenth century. The language is 
that of the Southern dialect, and it represents the com- 
mencement of a new period, during which, after a vio- 
lent struggle, in which the old inflections maintained 
their place side by side with the new, certain forms ac- 
quire the ascendency, to the exclusion of the others, 
and we consequently discover a greater simplicity of struc- 
ture, and a more uniform employment of inflections than 
in works of the preceding period. " The language of 
Layamon," says Sir Frederick Madden, " belongs to that 
transition period, in which the groundwork of Anglo- 
Saxon phraseology still existed, although gradually yield- 
ing to the influence of the popular forms of speech." 
We find in it marked indications of a tendency to adopt 
those terminations and sounds which characterize a lan- 
guage in a state of change, and which are apparent in 
some other branches of the Teutonic tongue. As illus- 
trating the " progress made in two centuries in depart- 
ing from the ancient and purer grammatical forms, as 
found in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, he mentions the use 
of a as an article, the change of the Anglo-Saxon termi- 
nations a and an, into e and en, as well as the disregard 
of inflections and genders, the masculine forms given to 



THE WORKS OF THE TKASTSITIOtf PERIOD. 57 

neuter nouns in the plural, the neglect of the feminine 
terminations of adjectives and pronouns, and confusion 
between the definite and indefinite declensions, the intro- 
duction of the preposition to before infinitives, and occa- 
sional use of weak preterites of verbs and participles instead 
of strong, the constant occurrence of en for on in the 
plural of verbs, and frequent elision of the final 0, together 
with uncertainty in the rule for the government of pre- 
positions." In the earlier text one of the most striking 
peculiarities is what Sir Frederick Madden has termed 
the " nunnation" consisting of the addition of a final 
n to certain cases of nouns and adjectives, to some tenses 
of verbs, and to several other parts of speech. One 
fact deserving particular attention in the English of 
Layamon, is the very slight infusion of Norman-French 
or Latin words. In the earlier text* we do not find more 
than fifty French words (even including some that may 
have come directly from the Latin), and of these fifty, 
several were in use in the preceding century. The 
later text retains about thirty of these, and adds about 
forty new ones, so that "if we reckon ninety words of 
French origin in both texts, containing together more 
than fifty-six thousand eight hundred, we shall be able to 
form a tolerably correct estimate of how little the English 
language was affected by foreign converse, even as late as 
the middle of the thirteenth century." Layamon's poem 
contains about thirty-two thousand two hundred and fifty 
lines, and the additions to the original constitute the 
finest portions of the work. " The structure of Laya- 
mon's poem," says Sir Frederick Madden, " consists 

* There are two texts of Layamon's " Brut " in existence, the first 
of which was probably written about 1200 ; the second about 1250. 



58 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



partly of lines in which the alliterative system of the 
Anglo-Saxons is preserved, and partly of couplets of 
unequal length, rhyming together." Many couplets oc- 
cur in which all these forms are intermingled, while in 
others they are not found at all, and the two systems are 
used in so arbitrary a manner, the author passing from 
rhyme to alliteration, and from alliteration to rhyme, 
that it is almost impossible to ascertain the relative pro- 
portions of each. Upon the whole the alliterative por- 
tion greatly predominates over the rhymes, even includ- 
ing the assonant rhymes, or those 'in which the vowels 
agree while the consonants are different, which is of 
frequent occurrence, though almost unknown elsewhere 
in English poetry.* 

The "Ancren Riwle," or "Anchorites' Rule," possesses 
little literary interest, though it is of decided philolog- 
ical or grammatical importance. It is a code of monastic 
regulations or precepts, written probably by an ecclesi- 
astic, for the guidance of three ladies to whom it is ad- 
dressed, and who formed a religious association, at Ta- 
rente, in Dorsetshire. The work was probably written 
late in the twelfth century, if not early in the thirteenth, 
and is therefore almost contemporaneous with the 
Chronicle of Lay am on, to the earlier text of which it 
exhibits a striking likeness. 

The literary merit of the work does not entitle it to 



* "One of the most remarkable orthographical changes in the 
work of Layamon, is the change from initial hw to wh; compare hwo, 
who, hwich, which. This transposition was not regularly employed 
by any writer before Layamon. Another noteworthy feature is his 
regular and accurate employment of shall and will as auxiliaries." 
— Marsh. " Layamon is the last writer who retains an echo of the 
literary Anglo-Saxon." — Earle. 






THE WORKS OP THE TRA^SITIOST PERIOD. 59 

especial attention, and it is merely on account of its 
value as illustrating the progress of transition from 
Saxon to English, that we include it in our history of the 
language. "The spelling," says Mr. Morton, "whether 
from carelessness or want of system, is of an uncommon 
and unsettled character, and may be pronounced barba- 
rous and uncouth. The language is semi-Saxon, or An- 
glo-Saxon somewhat changed, and in the first of the 
various stages through which it had to pass, before it 
arrived at the copiousness and elegance of our^modern 
English. The inflections, which originally marked the 
oblique cases of substantive nouns, and also the distinc- 
tions of gender, are for the most part discarded. Yet 
as these changes are partial and incomplete, enough of 
the more ancient characteristics of the language is left 
to justify the inference that the innovations are recent. 
Not only is es of the genitive case retained, but we very 
often meet with the dative and accusative in e, and the 
accusative in en, as then, the. We meet also occasionally 
with the genitive in re from the Saxon ra, and ne and 
ene from ena. The cases and genders of adjectives are 
generally disused, but not always. The moods and 
tenses of the verbs are little altered from the older 
forms, and in many words they are not. changed at all. 
The infinitive, which in pure Saxon ends invariably in 
a?t> is changed into enP From the general character of 
its structure, and from its resemblance to the older text 
of Lavamon, Mr. Morton concludes that in the u Ancren 
Riwle" we have a specimen of the language of the "West 
of England in the thirteenth century. One essential 
difference between the " Brut'' of Layamon and the " An- 
cren Riwle," is the much greater proportion of French 
words contained in the latter work. This, however, 



60 HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 






may be readily explained, as the topics discussed in the 
" Ancren Riwle" are theological and moral, and conse- 
quently required the employment of a Latin and 
French vocabulary. 

The " Ormulum" (1215) is described by its editor, Dr. 
White, as u a series of homilies in an imperfect state, 
composed in metre without alliteration, and, except in 
very few cases, also without rhyme ; the subject of the 
homilies being supplied by those portions of the New 
Testament which were read in the daily service of the 
church, the design of the writer being, first to give a 
paraphrastic version of the Gospel of the day, adapting 
the matter to the rules of his verse, with such verbal 
additions as were required for that purpose." The 
"Ormulum" (so called from its author, Orm, a monk of 
the Augustine Order) has more interest, both in a liter- 
ary and philological point of view, than any other 
work of the Transition Period. Orm appears to have 
been an orthoepist of nature's own making, and in his 
ingeniously devised system of spelling, we have the first 
known attempt at orthoepical reform in the history of 
our tongue. The assiduous and painstaking labors of 
the author, and his quaint devices for indicating the 
sounds of words by technical contrivances, imply a con- 
scious appreciation of the anomalies and diversities of 
English spelling, and his praiseworthy efforts were pro- 
bably designed to establish, or at least to preserve, a 
standard of correct pronunciation in the midst of dia- 
lectic divergences and confusions. The principal pecu- 
liarities of Orm's orthography consist " in a doubling of 
the consonant whenever it follows a vowel having any 
sound except that which is now indicated by the annex- 
ation of a final e to the single consonant. Thus, ga?i$ 



THE WOKKS OF THE TKAKSITIOK PERIOD. 61 

would be written pan by Orm, but pan, pann ; mean, 
men, but men, menn / pine, pin, but pin, pinn * time, 
tun, but' tun, tunnP The versification departs from 
the Anglo-Saxon standard, in wanting alliteration and in 
possessing a regular metrical flow ; and from the Nor- 
man-French in wanting rhyme. The vocabulary is 
slightly affected by Latin elements, and scarcely at all 
by Norman-French influence. The structure of the 
11 Ormulum " exhibits a more advanced stage of the lan- 
guage than Layamon ; in fact, so regular is its syntax com- 
pared with that of contemporaneous compositions, that it 
might almost be styled English instead of Anglo-Saxon. 
The " Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester" is a narrative 
of British and English history, from the siege of Troy 
to the death of Henry III., 1272. The earlier part of 
the work is founded upon Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
Latin History, but it is destitute of skill or imagination. 
"The author," says Warton, "has clothed the fables of 
Geoffrey of Monmouth in rhyme, which have often a more 
poetical air in Geoffrey's prose." The "Chronicle," how- 
ever, is worthy of notice, not only on account of its con- 
tributions to our knowledge of the history of England 
in the thirteenth century, but also because it is the old- 
est professed historical composition in the language. 
The style is that of the Western English. To the stu- 
dent of English philology, the work is peculiarly inter- 
esting, as illustrating the state of the language about the 
accession of Edward I., and also for the information it 
conveys respecting the bilingual condition of England 
produced by the introduction of the Norman tongue, 
and its prevalence during the author's lifetime, more 
than two centuries after the Conquest. We transcribe 
the following lines : 



62 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Thus come lo ! Engelonde into ISTormannes honde, 

And the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote her owe speche, 

And speke French as dude atom, and here children dude also teche, 

So that heymen of thys lond, that of her blod come, 

Holdeth alle thulke speche that hii of hem none 

Vor bote a man couthe French, me tolth of hym well lute, 

Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss, and to her kunde speche yute, 

Ich wene ther be ne man in world countreyes none, 

That ne holdeth to her kunde speche, but Engelond one, 

Ac wel me wot vor to conne bothe wel yt ys, 

Vor the more that a man con, the more worth he ys. 

That is : Tims lo ! England came into the hand of the 
Normans, and the Normans could not speak then but 
their own speech, and spoke French, as they did at 
home, and their children did all so teach ; so that high 
men of this land that of their blood come, retain all the 
same speech that they of them took. For unless a man 
know French, one talketh of him little. But low men 
hold to English and to their natural speech yet. I 
imagine there be no people in any country of the world 
that do not hold to their natural speech but in England 
alone. But well I wot it is well for to know both, for 
the more that a man knows the more worth he is. 



CHAPTEK VI. 

THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

The works of the Transition era enable us to trace 
with tolerable accuracy the series of changes by which 
Anglo-Saxon passed from its inflected to its uninflected 
stage. So gradual and difficult of chronological deter- 
mination are the changes which occur in every tongue, 
that it is impossible to fix with precision a point at 
which a language may be said to pass from one phase 
into another, from its radical to its agglutinative stage, 
or from its agglutinative to its inflected form. All such 
determinations of the periods of a language are to a cer- 
tain extent arbitrary, and the most that can be accom- 
plished is to approximate with some degree of correct- 
ness to those almost impalpable boundaries at which one 
speech fades into another, or passes from the exuberant 
vigour of youth to the maturity of manhood, or from the 
maturity of manhood to the infirmity of age. 

By the middle, or about the middle, of the thirteenth 
century, the Anglo-Saxon dialects had undergone so 
marked a simplification of structure that we are enabled 
to discover a gradual approximation to their modern 
representative, the standard English of the present day. 
The rise of the English tongue, as a new form of speech, 
may thus be dated from about the middle of the thir- 
teenth century, a. d. 1250. But this must be carefully 
distinguished from the rise of the Queen's English, or 



64 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

literary form of tlie language, which did not acquire the 
ascendency until a later period. There was at this pe- 
riod no generally received standard of speech. English 
had commenced its history, but it consisted merely of a 
congeries of dialects, which had diverged from the 
Anglo-Saxon stem, each having its grammatical peculi- 
arities and its literature, however imperfect ; varying in 
different localities, and agreeing only in one essential 
particular, the loss of inflections and general simplifica- 
tion of structure. 

Between the years 1215 and 1350, we trace the vigour- 
ous and praiseworthy efforts of the Saxon writers to 
establish a national literature. The poems of " Genesis 
and Exodus," " Havelok the Dane," the " Owl and the 
Nightingale," the "Romance of King Alexander," the 
"Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester," may be mentioned 
as exemplifications of this tendency.* But these pro- 
ductions, although enduring memorials of the patriotism 
of their authors, serve to illustrate the divided and dia- 
lectic condition of the language from the twelfth to the 
fourteenth century. During this long era of depression, 
Norman-French retained the ascendency as the dialect 
of the court and of fashionable circles, from which the 
verses of the Saxon poets were rigourously excluded. 
From the Conquest to about the middle of the fourteenth 
century, all the fashionable or popular literature of Eng- 

* By many philologists and critics, the celebrated " Proclamation 
of Henry III." (1258) is considered the first specimen of composition 
in the English tongue. But it bears no resemblance to the literary 
English, as has been pointed out by Mr. Earle. The proclamation 
has been printed from the original document, by Mr. Ellis, and it 
may be found among the publications of the Early English Text 
Society ; also in Earle's " Philology of the English Tongue," and in 
Corson's "Hand-Book of Anglo-Saxon and Early English." 



THE KISE OE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 65 

land was written in the Norman tongue. It was the lan- 
guage of light literature, of the romances, the ballads, 
and metrical chronicles, designed to entertain the Nor- 
man nobility and their followers. Their merits must 
have been of an inferior order, if we may judge from 
the ridicule with which they were assailed by Chaucer. 
The great mass of Norman-French literature was pro- 
duced in England; its cultivation commenced in that 
land, the Normans having no literature worthy of men- 
tion at the era of the Conquest. The fact to be particu- 
larly noted in this connection is, that during this long 
interval of gloom and oppression, from Aelfric to Chau- 
cer, the vernacular tongue never ceased to be cultivated. 
Expelled from elegant and courtly association, dissev- 
ered into dialects, unable to compete with the dominant 
idiom, it was cherished with assiduous diligence in the 
monasteries and abbeys, and many of the literary memo- 
rials of this age are remarkable compositions, if we con- 
sider the circumstances under which they were produced. 

But this protracted period of national and linguistic 
depression was to be relieved by the coming of a 
brighter day. Hitherto we have seen merely a discord- 
ant English language, without generally acknowledged 
standards or canons of literature. There was no national 
speech and no national unity until the middle of the four- 
teenth century. The Anglo-Saxon as the language of 
the people, the Latin as the dialect of learning and the 
clergy, and the French as the speech of the court and 
the aristocracy, existed side by side, without seriously 
affecting or modifying each other's vocabulary until 
about the reign of Edward III., 1327-77. 

The distrust and animosity generated by the Conquest 
prevented a blending either of nationalities or dialects, 



66 HISTOKY OP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

and the two languages, like the two races, pursued their 
courses like parallel streams, without converging or com- 
mingling. The Norman-French dislocated the inflec- 
tions of English, and disturbed its pronunciation ; while 
Anglo-Saxon imparted a number of words to the vocabu- 
lary of French. To all intents, however, the two tongues 
remained essentially separate, and each imparted as much 
as it received. But those important political events that 
clouded the latter years of Edward's brilliant reign, the loss 
of all the splendid Continental acquisitions of England 
(which embraced the Atlantic coast of France, and 
which were further advanced, both in social and intellec- 
tual culture than the Normans of England), marked the 
commencement of a new era in the history of the Eng- 
lish race and the English tongue. The disasters which 
cast a shadow over the declining years of this glorious 
reign, led to the renunciation of those cherished dreams 
of foreign conquest that had captivated the imagination 
and fired the knightly spirit of Englishmen, and tended 
powerfully to blend into a homogeneous mass the dis- 
cordant populations of the island, to make England the 
centre of their affections and their interests — their com- 
mon country. " Had the Plantagenets," says Macaulay, 
" as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all 
France under their government, it is probable that Eng- 
land would never have had an independent existence. 
The noble language of Milton and Burke would have 
remained a rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed 
grammar, or a fixed orthography, and would have been 
contemptuously abandoned to the boors. No man of 
English extraction would have risen to eminence, except 
by becoming in speech and in habits a Frenchman." 
Whatever sentimental regrets we may be disposed to 



THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 67 

indulge for the loss of the magnificent conquests of Ed- 
ward III., and the Black Prince, yet it is from this 
epoch that we must date the commencement of English 
greatness. The energies of her people, diverted from 
the thoughts of Continental empire, were now directed 
to the development of a country which was henceforth 
to be the seat of their power; and from this era, the 
English tongue, partaking of the spirit and the aspira- 
tions of those who spoke it, woke from its long lethargy, 
and entered upon its unparalleled career. Under the 
influence of these important political events, social 
jealousies and national hostilities began slowly to fade 
away, as the two languages and the two races began 
gradually to melt into one.* Unity and harmony of sen- 
timent, the partial concession of political privileges to 
the humbler classes, the formation of social alliance 
among the hitherto isolated nationalities, necessarily led 
to the partial blending of the two idioms, and to their 
reciprocal action and influence. For nearly two hundred 
years after the Conquest, English appears to have been 
spoken and written without any serious admixture of 
French. " The entire English vocabulary of the thir- 
teenth century, so far as it is known to us in its printed 
literature, consists of about eight thousand words. Of 
these about one thousand, or between twelve and thir- 
teen per cent., are of Latin or Romance origin, "f a strik- 
ing illustration of the slight impression that the long 
continuance of French domination in England had made 
upon the vocabulary of the vernacular tongue. It was 

* The union of the two races had been partially accomplished in 
the reign of Henry II., and in the reign of John, by the conquest 
of Normandy (1204), and by the enactment of Magna Charta (1215). 

f Marsh's "Origin and History of the English Language/' 



68 HISTGKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

the structure of the language that principally suffered 
from foreign contact, during the two centuries following 
the Conquest. Nor did the Norman-French escape the 
pernicious effects of foreign influence. On the contrary, 
it experienced decided alterations from its contact with 
the decaying Saxon, and suffered as much mutation as it 
had produced. Upon the conquest of Normandy from 
King John in 1204 by Philip Augustus, the kings of 
England ceased to be dukes of Normandy, and the Nor- 
man language, separated from the culture of its ancestral 
home, gradually declined in purity ; it lost its original 
accentuation, and assumed an insular character. It ac- 
quired an antiquated and incorrect air ; certain features 
belonging to the provincial dialect of Normandy had 
engrafted themselves upon it, and its pronunciation 
seems to have resembled the accent of Lower Normandy. 
In addition, this accent, when introduced into England, 
received a perceptible impress from Saxon articulation. 
The speech of the Anglo-Norman barons was distin- 
guished from that of Normandy by a stronger articula- 
tion of particular syllables, and more especially of the 
final consonants. It was corrupted by Anglicisms, and 
was sometimes little more than a mutilated English. 
Even persons of culture, like Chaucer's gentle and 
decorous Prioress, spoke a French which was utterly 
opposed " to French of Paris," for although she could 
speak it " f ul fayre and f etisly," she followed the French 
of " Stratford atte Bowe, for Frenche of Paris was to 
hire (her) unknowe." 

If such was the French of the educated, we can readi- 
ly imagine what it must have been in the mouths of the 
peasantry who affected to understand it. Trevisa tells us, 
" Jack wold be a gentleman yf he coude speke Frensche." 



THE KISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 69 

" III Piers Ploughman," says Mr. Earle, " we have the 

dykers and delvers, with their bits of French, doing 

a very bad day's work, but eminently polite to the ladies 

of the family : 

1 Dykers and Delvers that don here werk ille, 

And driveth forth the longe day, with Deu, vous saue, dam emme.' " 

These specimens will illustrate the extended preva- 
lence of French in England, as well as its deformed and 
debased condition. The more widely it was diffused, 
the less firm was its sway, until in the fourteenth century 
it was a general subject of jest and ridicule. But as the 
French declined, the native language was growing more 
and more into repute. The new political and social con- 
ditions of which we have spoken, were beginning to 
accomplish their natural result. The commingling of 
the two races involved a coalescence of the two tongues. 
Henceforth the native language began to adopt and 
naturalize French vocables, appropriating them, not as 
badges of subjection, but as trophies of a successful 
contest against a valiant and determined foe. The adop- 
tion and intermixture of French words commenced when 
English was received as the speech of that part of the 
nation which had previously spoken French. So rapidly 
did the language, now conscious of its powers, and an- 
ticipating the brilliant triumphs in reserve for it, absorb 
the foreign material, that between 1300 and 1350, as 
many Latin and French words were introduced into the 
vocabulary of the English tongue, as in the whole period 
of more than two centuries that had intervened between 
the Conquest and the commencement of the fourteenth 
century. About the middle of this century, the native 
speech appears in full vigour and promise; the era of its 
gloom and depression is passed. Trevisa designates the 



70 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

great plague of 1349 as a point after which the popular 
fancy for speaking French began to abate. He says : 
" This was moche used tofore the grete deth, but sith it 
is somedele chaunged. For John Cornwaile, a maister of 
gramar, chaungide the lore (learning) in gramar scole and 
construction of (from) Frensch into Englisch, and Richard 
Pencriche lerned that maner teching of him, and other 
men of Pencriche. So that now, the yere of owre Lord, 
a thousand thre hundred four score and fyve (1349), of 
the secunde King JRychard after the Conquest nyne, in 
alle the gramar scoles of England, children leveth 
Frensch, and construeth and lerneth an (in) Englisch." 

In 1362 w^as passed the statute enacting that all pleas 
pleaded in the King's Courts should be pleaded in the 
English tongue, and enrolled in Latin ; the pleadings 
previously to this time having been entered in French, 
and the enrollments of them sometimes in French, and 
sometimes in Latin. Thus we see the English language 
restored to its natural rights in the schools of the realm, 
and in the courts of law. The reason alleged for the 
last-mentioned change was, that the French language 
had become so much unknown in the realm, that the 
people who were parties to suits at law had no know- 
ledge nor understanding of that which is said for or 
against them by their sergeants and other pleaders. Yet, 
strangely enough, this very statute is in French, which, 
though it had ceased to be the language of the people, 
continued to a considerably later period to be the mother 
tongue of the Norman dynasty, and probably that gener- 
ally spoken at Court, and in the House of Lords. 

Edward III. wrote his letters and despatches in French, 
and there is but one recorded instance in which this 
monarch is known to have used the English tongue. 






THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 71 

It was during the first half of the fifteenth century 
that the English language, growing more and more into 
repute, ended by totally supplanting the French, except 
with the great barons, who, before they renounced the 
dialect of their fatherland, beguiled their weary hours 
with works in both languages. Towards the end of the 
fifteenth century, the kings of England and their court- 
iers appear to have spoken the French with fluency and 
correctness ; but this was purely an individual accom- 
plishment. The Norman was no longer the vernacular 
speech of the great, nor the idiom with which children 
were acquainted from their cradles ; it was cultivated 
merely as an intellectual discipline or a polite accom- 
plishment, as in the present age we study the languages 
of Greece and Home. 

Thus, about four centuries after the battle of Has- 
tings, disappear the differences of dialect, which, together 
with the disparity of social conditions, had marked the 
separation of the two races, the one descended from the 
followers of "William, and the other from the followers 
of Harold. 



Vv/v 



OHAPTEE YIL 

THE KISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE {continued). * 

In the preceding chapter we endeavoured to indicate 
the causes, social and political, which blended the oppos- 
ing Saxons and Normans, and restored the native lan- 
guage to its natural and inalienable privileges. By the 
action of those causes, there were gradually created a 
national speech and a national sentiment, but the fusion 
was not complete ; the proportion of Norman and Saxon 
elements in the newly formed tongue was not definitely 
ascertained ; it wanted that harmony, symmetry, and 
precision which are acquired only by judicious culture, 
and by the establishment of generally acknowledged 
standards of literary excellence. Hence, what the 
language needed, for the development of its powers, 
was the moulding influence of some great word artist, 
who could assign to the constituents of the vocabulary 
their rank and proportion, regulate its syntactical struc- 
ture, and render it the fit medium for the loftiest senti- 
ments, the grandest aspirations, that were to be embodied 
in it. It was not until the tongue had been transmuted 
Jby the plastic touch of Chaucer, had given utterance to 
the oracles of God, under the guidance of Wycliffe, 
and been refined by the precise and accurate rhyme of 
" ancient Gower," that it advanced to that pre-eminence 
which it has maintained above all the languages of 
Europe. 






THE EISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 73 

Let us first observe the process by which the vocabu- 
lary of the fourteenth century was formed, the sources 
whence its varied wealth was gathered, ere it was sub- 
jected to the delicate scrutiny of Chaucer, and was regu- 
lated by the precise and accurate rhyme of Gower. 

It is a prevalent though a mistaken impression, that 
the great number of French words which flowed into the 
English language during the fourteenth century are to 
be attributed to poetry, and other departments of liter- 
ature. " The law, which now first became organized 
into a science, introduced very many terms borrowed 
from the nomenclature of Latin and French jurispru- 
dence; the glass-worker, the enameller, the architect, 
the brass-founder, the Flemish clothier, whom Norman 
taste and luxury invited, or domestic oppression expelled, 
from the Continent, brought with them the vocabularies 
of their respective arts ; and Mediterranean commerce, 
which was stimulated by the demand for English wool, 
then the finest in Europe, imported from the harbours 
of a sea where French was the predominant language, 
both new articles of merchandise and the French des- 
ignations of them. The sciences too, medicine, physics, 
geography, alchemy, astrology, all of which became 
known to England chiefly through French channels, 
added numerous specific terms to the existing vocabu- 
lary."* The poets, so far from marring the native speech 
by too copious an infusion of French words, were re- 
served in their employment of them, and when not 
compelled by the necessities of versification, selected a 
vocabulary principally composed of Anglo-Saxon words. 
The correctness of this assertion may be established by 

* Marsh's " History of the English Language." 

4 



74 HISTOKY OF THE EKGLISH LANGUAGE. 

comparing the dialect of the prose writers of this era, 
with those poetical compositions which are designed for 
the least refined classes, and which, consequently, em- 
ploy the simplest and most unpretending diction. This 
has been admirably illustrated by Mr. Marsh in his 
" Origin and History of the English Language,' 5 268- 
270. Sir John Mandeville is the first regular prose 
writer who employed the newly formed language. After 
spending many years in foreign travel, he returned to 
England, and composed (1356) an account of his travels, 
written in Latin, translated into French, and then into 
English, " that every man of his nation might read and 
understand it." The book appears to have had a very 
extensive circulation, as there are many copies in exist- 
ence, and its vocabulary must have been perfectly intel- 
ligible to the masses of English-speaking people. Though 
the style and syntactical structure of Mandeville are 
English, the proportion of Latin and French words em- 
ployed in his unadorned, unpoetical narrative, is greater 
than is found in the works of Langlande, Chaucer, 
Gower, or any other English poet of the fourteenth 
century. In the prologue, which contains, exclusive of 
Latin and Greek proper names, less than twelve hun- 
dred words, more than one hundred and thirty, or eleven 
per cent., are of Latin or French origin, and of these, 
the following are new to English, not being found 
in the printed literature of the preceding century : 
Assembly, because, comprehend, conquer, certain, en- 
viron, excellent, former (noun), frailty, glorious, inflame, 
inumber (inumbrate), moisten, nation, people, philoso- 
pher, plainly, proclaim, promise, pronounce, province, 
publish, reconcile, redress, subject, temporal, translate, 
trespasser, visit. The following words contained in 



THE KISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 75 

Chapters I., II., III., XXI., XXII., were first pointed 
out by Mr. Marsh. Abstain, abundant, ambassador, 
anoint, apparel, appear, appraise, array, attendance; 
benefice, benignly, bestial ; calculation, cause, chaplet. 
cherish, circumcision, claim, command (verb), compari- 
son, continually, contrarious, contrary, convenient, con- 
vert, corner, cover, cruelty, cubit, curiously ; date, defend 
(forbid), degree, deny, deprive, desert- (waste), devoutly, 
diaper, discordant, discover, disfigured, dispend, dissever, 
diversity, duchy ; enemy, enforce, engender, estate, esti- 
mation, examine; faithfully, fiercely, foundation, fornica- 
tion ; generation, governance, gum ; idol, immortal, 
imprint, incline, inspiration ; join ; letters (alphabetic 
characters), lineage ; marquis, menace, minstrelsy, money, 
monster, mortal, multitude; necessary; obedient, obeis- 
sante, obstacle, officer, opinion, ordinance, ordinately, 
orient, ostrich, outrageously ; paper, pasture, pearls, perch 
(a pole), perfectly, profitable, promise (noun), proper 
(own), province, purple ; quantity ; rebellion, receive, re- 
gion, relation, religious, return, reverend, royalty, royally, 
rudely ; sacrament, science, search, scripture, servitor, 
signification, simony, soldier, solemn, specialty, spiritual, 
stranger, subjection, superscription ; table, temporal, 
testament, throne (verb), tissue, title (inscription) ; unc- 
tion, usury ; value, vary, vaulted, vessel, vicar, victory, 
vulture. 

We find, then, in the prologue, and in the five chap- 
ters from which these words are taken, comprising 
about one-eighth of the volume, one hundred and seventy- 
four words of Latin and Romance origin, not contained 
in the printed literature of the thirteenth century. It is 
evident, from the results of this investigation, that the 
charge so often preferred against the poets of the four- 



76 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

teenth century, of having corrupted the purity of their 
native tongue by foreign admixture, is unsupported and 
unjust. It was the serious diminution of its resources 
that the Anglo-Saxon had experienced during the dreary 
period of its literary subjection, when its powers were 
enfeebled for lack of assiduous culture, and its intellec- 
tual and moral vocabulary languished and decayed, 
which rendered necessary the introduction of Latin and 
French terms. We have already alluded to the rich- 
ness of its theological and intellectual vocabulary, and 
it was in these departments that it had encountered the 
severest losses. So long as England remained inde- 
pendent of Continental alliances, the Saxon preserved 
its copious spiritual nomenclature, unaffected by foreign 
admixture or interference. The reign of Edward the 
Confessor introduced England into the sphere of Con- 
tinental relations, and the Conquest gave the finishing 
stroke to the employment of Saxon for ecclesiastical 
and spiritual purposes ; Norman priests and teachers ad- 
hered pertinaciously to the consecrated dialect of Home, 
and the native spiritual and intellectual vocabulary, fall- 
ing into disuse, became gradually obsolete. Hence, when 
the new language began to be employed as a literary 
speech, its defects in these essential particulars had to 
be remedied by calling into service the corresponding 
terms in the Norman tongue. The old and oft repeated 
complaint, urged against the poets of this century by 
Gil, Yerstegan, and Skimer, is not sustained by the 
evidence ; it was an erroneous opinion, based upon an 
imperfect acquaintance with the historical development 
of our language. The foreign vocables would doubt- 
less have secured all the privileges of English citizenship, 
if the fourteenth century did not record the name of a 



THE KISE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 77 

single poet. The language was recovering its conscious- 
ness; a coalescence of the separated nationalities in- 
volved a blending of their tongues, and the influx of 
foreign words was a necessity, which, in any event, must 
have resulted from the altered political and social rela- 
tions of the kingdom. It was the exalted function of 
the poets of this age to refine, polish, and skilfully dis- 
pose of the linguistic materials, that the fusion of races, 
and the other causes indicated above, had accumulated ; 
to adjust the imperfectly blended elements, assigning to 
each its importance; and from their harmonious com- 
mingling, to evolve a language adequate to all the de- 
mands of the peerless literature that was to be treasured 
up in it. The poets, in short, were the arbiters, the 
umpires, the law-givers of the language. 



CHAPTEK VIII, 



PIEKS, THE PLOWMAN, 



The interest and importance of " The Vision of Piers 
Plowman" arise not so much from its literary execution, 
or its intrinsic excellence, as from the fact that it is the 
first composition in which the English spirit and genius 
are distinctly perceptible. The history of English 
literature dates from the age of Chaucer and Gower, 
under whose guidance the literary speech assumed a 
definite form and character. But the "Vision of the 
Plowman," though written in a dialect, presaged the 
speedy advent of that glorious morn, when the new 
language and the new literature were to enter upon 
that magnificent career which have made them the 
wonder of our history. Piers Plowman, then, is the 
first writer, truly English in sentiment, and his " Vision " 
is an appropriate prelude to those grand bursts of melody 
that were soon to fill the balmy air with " sounds that 
echo still." 

It is difficult to ascertain with precision the date of 
the poem known as "The Vision of Piers Plowman," but 
it was probably composed about 1360-70. The author- 
ship of the work is also involved in obscurity, and the 
tradition which ascribes it to Robert Langlande, an Eng- 
lish ecclesiastic, is not established by trustworthy evi- 
dence. But a fictitious Langlande has long had the 



PIERS, THE PL0WMAK. 79 

credit of the poem, and as no conclusive testimony has 
been adduced to invalidate his claim, there is no danger 
of doing injustice to the genuine author, by appropriating 
the name of Langlande as the impersonation of some 
unknown writer. The acquaintance with ecclesiastical 
literature which the poem displays, indicates that the 
author was connected with the clerical profession. He 
foreshadowed the teachings of Wycliffe, and he perhaps 
ultimately attained the same conclusions as this illustri- 
ous champion of the truth. Every writer who secures 
an abiding-place in the memory of his countrymen 
must be, in a greater or less degree, an exponent of the 
age ; he must embody and reflect its intellectual senti- 
ments and tendencies, its religious and political opinions. 
In the dawn of every literature this principle forms an 
essential element of success, and the author of the 
" Vision " merely invested with poetic garb the sympa- 
thies and the aspirings in which every English heart 
participated. The " Vision of Piers Plowman," there- 
fore, derives its poetic interest, not from its revelation 
of unknown truths, but from its lucid reflection of the 
life and character of the age, its exposure of ecclesiastical 
corruptions, its .distinctive dialect and alliterative form, 
which gave it an extensive circulation among the hum- 
bler classes. It bodied forth those grand religious dog- 
mas which were dimly apprehended, and by presenting 
them forcibly to the consciousness of the English people, 
it prepared the way for the reception of those tenets 
which the efforts of Wycliffe and his adherents were 
already disseminating. The numerous manuscripts of 
the w r ork in existence, show how general its circulation 
must have been, and the marked variations in different 
copies prove that it was deemed worthy of diligent 



8G HISTORY OE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

recension by the original author, or, at least, that it was 
essentially modified by the scribes to whose inspec- 
tion it had been submitted. The " Vision " had become 
a national possession, a sort of "didactic catechism." 
The querulous tone which pervades the work would 
tend to increase its popularity among the middle classes, 
who, though gradually acquiring a degree of social and 
political influence, were not yet sufficiently powerful to 
protect themselves against the encroachments of their 
civil and ecclesiastical rulers. One circumstance that in- 
vests the poem with peculiar interest, is its adherence 
to the ancient alliterative system of versification ; and 
it was the last work of eminence that conformed to the 
canons of Anglo-Saxon verse. The " Vision of the 
Plowman" displays the accurate acquaintance of its 
author with the Latin Scriptures, the treatises of the 
Fathers, and the works of Romish expositors, though 
it contains few indications of a knowledge of Romance 
literature. Still, the proportion of Norman-French 
words, or at least of Norman-French words assimilated 
to Latin, is equal to that contained in the poetry of 
Chaucer. While the conception of the poem was doubt- 
less induced by the moral and political condition of 
contemporary England, the manner of treatment is 
purely original ; its whole tenor is an entire departure 
from the established character of Anglo-Saxon poetrj^. 
Though the poem is defective in unity of plan, its in- 
tent and spirit are one. The scope of the poem is re- 
stricted, being to a considerable extent in the form of a 
dialogue. In these portions, the language represents 
the dialect of common life, though the characters are 
not delineated with sufficient individuality to invest it 
with a dramatic colouring. It was, however, well adapted 






PIEKS, THE PLOWMAN. 81 

to the intelligence of the class for whom it was designed, 
as is attested by its extended circulation, notwithstand- 
ing its occasional introduction of Latin quotations. 

The diction of the " Yision " is more archaic than 
that of Chancer; many of its words have become ob- 
solete, and some have entirely disappeared. The syn- 
tax, the structure, and the vocabulary, however, present 
as marked a resemblance as those of any two modern 
authors who should discuss topics so unrelated, and ad- 
dress audiences so diverse, as the cavaliers of Chaucer 
and the peasants of Langlande."* The following outline 
will illustrate the grammar of Piers the Plowman. 

Nouns. The nominative plural commonly ends in es, 
as in shroudes / sometimes in s, as Udders / or in z, as 
in diamantz. For es, is is sometimes found, as in wittis, 
and very rarely us, as folus / some few plurals are in 
en, as chylderen. A few nouns, such as folk, which 
were originally neuter, have no termination in the plural. 
Gees, men, are plurals formed by vowel change ; fete and 
feet are various spellings of the plural of foot. 

Cases. The genitive singular ends in es, sometimes 
corrupted into is, as cattes, cattis ; other endings are very 
rare. The genitive plural ends in en or ene, as clerken. 
The dative singular commonly ends in e, as in to iedde. 

Adjectives. The distinction between definite and 
indefinite adjectives is difficult, owing to the irregularity 
of the alliterative rhythm, and the additions of copyists 
and scribes. Plural adjectives should end in e, and gen- 
erally do, as alle. The re-duplication of a consonant when 
a syllable is added is worth notice ; thus alle is the plural 

* Langlande wrote in the d&lect of the Western shires, but his 
style is marked by Midland peculiarities. 

4* 



82 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

of al, as shnllen is the plural of the auxiliary shal. 
Very rarely plural adjectives of French origin end in 
es. The comparative of heigh is herre ; superlative, 
hexte. Adjectives and adverbs ending in ly, sometimes 
form their comparatives and superlatives in loker, lohest, 
as light, lightloker, MghtloJcest. 

Pronouns are the same as in Chaucer, but besides sehe, 
the older form heo is used, and besides pel, the older 
form h (hy). There are also traces of dialectic confu- 
sion and admixture in the use of the pronouns ; their is 
denoted by here, her, or hri y them by hem, etc., etc. 

Verbs. The indicative plural ends both in en and eth, 
as geten, conneth. The past tense of weak verbs which 
should end in ede, ends, commonly, in ed only, both 
in the singular and plural, as pley-ed, but sometimes 
the full plural form, -eden occurs. In weak verbs, which 
should form their past tenses in de or te, the final e is 
often dropped. Thus, went for wente. In strong verbs, 
which should terminate (in the first and third persons 
singular of the past tense) in a consonant, we often find 
an e added ; thus : I shape for I shop. The plural gen- 
erally has the correct form, en, as chosen. In the infin- 
itive mood some verbs are found with the ending ie or 
ye, and final e is sometimes dropped. The present par- 
ticiple ends in yng, as worchyng / the prefix y is often 
found before past participles, sometimes even before 
past tenses.* 

The words are selected with care, and employed with 
discrimination as well as with reference to their radical 
significance. Notwithstanding the allegorical drapery 
of the "Vision," it affords us a graphic portraiture of 

* Skeat's Introduction to " Piers Plowman." 



PIERS, THE PLOWMAN. 83 

English society in the fourteenth century; it removes 
the obscuring veil, and allows us a glimpse of the inner 
life of the nation. We have incidental descriptions of 
the food, the dress, the domestic status of the humbler 
classes, the foul dealing of tradesmen and mechanics ; in 
short, a vivid portraiture of English life in the four- 
teenth century, drawn by a contemporary, and surpassing 
in naturalness the intricate details of the historian. 
Though the poem does not enter into chronological 
discussion, it is a valuable addition to our knowledge of 
English character and English society in the age that 
produced a Chaucer and a Wycliffe. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

THE WTCLIFFITE VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPTURES. 

The Wyclifiite versions of the "Scriptures exerted a 
decided influence' in developing that particular dialect 
of English which became the literary form of the lan- 
guage. They thus tended to prepare the way for 
Chaucer and Gower^Jthe former of whom was probably 
indebted to the Wyclifiite translations for much of the 
wealth and beauty of his diction and vocabulary. The 
Wyclifiite versions of the Scriptures are therefore enti- 
tled to special consideration in a history which treats 
of the origin and formation of the English tongue. 
Though the Anglo-Saxon possessed a native translation 
of the Gospels, and of some other portions of the Bible, 
there is no reason to suppose that any considerable part 
of the Scriptures, except the Psalter, had been rendered 
into English until the translation of the entire sacred 
volume was attempted, by the advice of Wycliffe, and 
partially executed by him about the last quarter of the 
fourteenth century. Whatever Biblical knowledge the 
English had acquired was gathered from their clergy, 
who introduced into their discourses translations from 
the Vulgate, or Latin version of St. Jerome. These 
were not intended for circulation, and consequently no 
opportunity was afforded for the study of the Scriptures 
in the vernacular tongue. The translation of Wycliffe 
was made from the Latin Vulgate, the authorized veiv 



THE WYCLIFFITE VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPTURES. 85 

sion of the Romish Church. There is no direct evidence 
to prove that any of the translators were sufficiently 
versed in the Greek and Hebrew to translate directly 
from either of those tongues, and, in consequence, the 
structural peculiarities, or the phraseological combina- 
tions, which they impressed upon their version, are 
derived from the Yulgate, except so far as the style and 
diction of the Yulgate itself had been affected by the 
syntax and vocabulary of the Greek and Hebrew. 

No detailed examination of these works is contem- 
plated, nor an endeavour to ascertain the share which 
Wycliffe had in the execution of them. It is sufficient 
for our purpose to say, that in the only trustworthy edi- 
tion we have of any of them, the older text, from Gene- 
sis to Baruch, third chapter, twentieth verse, is probably 
the work of Hereford, an English ecclesiastic, while 
the remainder of the Old Testament, and the Apocry- 
pha, are supposed to have been executed by Wycliffe. 
There exists no reasonable doubt that the whole New 
Testament was rendered into English by him. It is 
impossible to ascertain precisely the date of the com- 
mencement and completion of this important work, but 
there are good reasons for believing that the older text 
was finished about 1380, the revised edition of Purvey 
about 1390. Notwithstanding the labour and expense of 
transcribing, the translations appear to have been widely 
circulated, as many manuscripts are in existence. 

The fidelity and accuracy that characterize the Wyc- 
liffe versions may be ascribed principally to the action 
of two causes : First, the translators, as well as the peo- 
ple, were imbued with those intense religious sensibili- 
ties, and that consciousness of intellectual elevation, 
which result from spiritual emancipation. Second, the 



86 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

structure of the language was then marked by simpli- 
city and freedom of expression. Its elasticity and plian- 
cy had not been checked by the imposition of gram- 
matical canons or by the constraining influence of arbi- 
trary prescription, and it therefore more closely con- 
formed to the style of the original Scriptures than the 
polished and formal diction of later ages. These ver- 
sions, consequently, display, in structure and in vocabu- 
lary, a closer assimilation to the spirit and genius of the 
ancient text than could have been attained with a fixed 
syntactical order and a vocabulary, a great proportion of 
whose words had assumed determinate and invariably 
shades of meaning. The most important result accom- 
plished by these versions was the formation of an Eng- 
lish religious dialect, which, with unessential modifica- 
tions, has remained the language of devotion and of 
Scriptural translation to the present day. While our 
secular dialect has been fluctuating, inconsistent, and 
subject to frequent mutations, we have possessed from 
the dawn of our literary language a sacred vocabulary, 
idiomatic, uniform, and harmonious. 

It is remarkable that the style of the original works 
supposed to have been written by Wycliffe, is much less 
regular than that of the New Testament, which, instead 
of exhibiting that discordance of forms characteristic of 
the authors of that period, appears to have adopted 
some model, and to have adhered to it without variation. 
The consistent and regular structure of Wycliffe's New 
Testament imparted to the work a pre-eminence as a 
standard of sacred and devotional phraseology, and 
many of the archaic constructions of the Authorized 
Version, as well as many of its special forms, were 
transferred by Purvey and Tyndale from Wy cliff e, and 



THE WYCLIFFITE YERSIOXS OF THE SCRIPTURES. 87 

from Tyndale by the translators of King James's reign, 
remaining unchanged during a period of five centuries. 
To so great an extent are the Wycliffite versions the 
basis of all succeeding translations, that though the 
reader may occasionally be perplexed by an obsolete 
word, an archaic idiom, or an antique spelling, it is 
plausibly conjectured by an eminent critic, that if the 
illustrious Reformer were restored to life he would be 
able to read and understand our modern edition of the 
Bible without assistance. The writings of Langlande 
and of Wycliffe (particularly the latter) introduced into 
the English language a great number of words derived 
directly from the Latin, or from the Latin through the 
Norman-French. They conferred a more important 
benefit upon the colloquial dialect by giving a general 
circulation to many Latin and French words which had 
never acquired popular acceptance, but had been re- 
stricted to literary use. The dissemination of "Piers 
the Plowman's Vision" among the higher classes was 
prevented by its retention of the ancient alliterative 
versification, and the works of "Wycliffe were, in a great 
measure, banished from the same circles by the conjoint 
action of the secular and spiritual power, as seditious and 
heretical. Hence, their circulation was confined to that 
class whose obscurity afforded them immunity from civil 
and ecclesiastical persecution. Notwithstanding these 
unfavourable surroundings, the translators of the four- 
teenth century and their polemical compositions percep- 
tibly increased the richness of our moral and theological 
vocabulary, and much of the excellence of our present 
version of the Scriptures is due to the valuable acces- 
sions which our language received from their assiduous 
labours. While the writings of Wycliffe cannot be re- 



88 HISTORY OF THE EKGLISH LANGUAGE. 

garded as models of the literary language as it existed 
in his age, they contributed efficaciously by their excel- 
lence and their extensive circulation to the importance 
of the East Midland dialect, and thus tended essentially 
to secure for that speech the pre-eminence as the stand- 
ard form of the language. It is probable, too, that they 
contributed to the verbal affluence of Chaucer, and in 
this manner exerted a specific influence in enriching the 
vocabulary of the new-born tongue. The political fac- 
tion with which Chaucer sympathized was disposed to 
regard the Reformer with favour, and must have cher- 
ished a kindly sentiment towards the common people, 
who formed the reading public of Langlande and Wyc- 
liffe. Hence we may readily imagine that Chaucer had 
perused the translation of the Scriptures as well as the 
"Vision of the Plowman;" nor could a genius of his 
subtle perception fail to discover that these works treas- 
ured up verbal gems of purest ray, though in a crude 
and unpolished condition. These rich jewels, trans- 
muted by his masterly touch, tended to enrich and gild 
his diction, and the surpassing excellence of his style is 
partly to be attributed to his skillful extraction of the 
pure gold from the writings of his contemporaries, a 
means of improvement to which the intolerance of infe- 
rior artists would not permit them to descend. 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

In the preceding chapters, we endeavoured to indicate 
that series of processes by which the Anglo-Saxon 
tongue was divested of its synthetic form, and, deprived 
of the conservative power of literary nurture, gradually 
became disintegrated, diverging into several dialects, 
distinguished by well-defined grammatical and structural 
peculiarities. The language and the literature that we 
have hitherto considered are dialectic in character, as 
there was thus far no generally recognized standard of 
speech, and consequently no national literature. The 
commencement of literary English must be dated from 
the latter half of the fourteenth century, and from 
the writings of Chaucer and his contemporary, Gower. 
These are the true founders of the literary form of our 
tongue. Having arrived at this important point, the 
rise of the King's English, it may be well, before pro- 
ceeding further, to notice minutely the precise condition 
which the language had attained at this period. 

For the sake of method, it will be convenient to go 
through the several parts of speech in the order in which 
they are commonly ranged by grammarians. 

First. The prepositive article, re, reo, paet (which 
answered to the 6 rj to of the Greeks), in all its varieties 
of gender, case, and number, had been long laid aside, 



90 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

and instead of it an indeclinable the was prefixed to all 
sorts of nouns, in all cases and in both numbers. 

Second. The declensions of the nouns substantive 
were reduced from six to one, and instead of a variety 
of cases in both numbers, they had only a genitive case 
singular, which was uniformly deduced from the nomi- 
native by adding to it es ; or only s if it ended in an e 
feminine ; and that same form was used to express the 
plural number in all its cases. The nouns adjective had 
lost all distinction of gender, case, or number. 

Third. The personal pronouns retained only one 
oblique case in each number. Their possessive pronouns 
were in the same condition with the adjectives. The 
interrogative and relative who had now only a genitive 
whos, and an accusative whom, and no variety of number. 
The demonstrative this and that had only the plurals 
thise and tho, and no case. Other pronominal words 
had become undeclined, with very few exceptions. 

Fourth. The verbs were very nearly reduced to their 
present simple state, having four moods, the indicative, 
subjunctive, imperative, and infinitive, and two tenses, 
the present and the past. All the other varieties of 
mood and tense were expressed by auxiliary verbs. The 
future, with shall, w T as coming into use. It first occurs 
in Layamon, but the original meaning was retained by 
Chaucer: "For by the faithe I schal (owe) to <rod." 
The inflection of the verb in the singular number was 
nearly the same as at present, I love, thou lovest, he lov- 
eth. In the plural varying forms were used ; sometimes 
the Saxon form in eth w r as used — we, ye, they loveth / 
sometimes the form in en — we, ye, they loven. This 
latter was the prevailing form in the past tense, plural 
number,— we loveden. The Saxon termination of the in- 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1ST THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 91 

finitive an, was changed to en — to loven. The n was 
gradually disappearing, leaving to love. The present 
participle generally ended in ing, but the ancient form 
in ende or ande was still in use — lovende, lovande. The 
progressive changes were end, ind, in, ing. The past 
participle was formed in ed or contractions of ed, such 
as e final, as caste, hurte. The past participle was also 
formed in en, particularly in irregular verbs. Sometimes 
the n was lost — take for taken. The auxiliaries were 
still inflected, though not long after Chaucer— we shallen 
love. To have and to ben w^ere complete verbs, and the 
latter, with the past participle and the other auxiliary 
verbs, supplied the place of the passive voice. 

Fifth. With respect to the indeclinable parts of speech, 
it is sufficient to remark that many of them remained 
pure Saxon ; the greater number, however, were be- 
coming abbreviated. 

Such was the general condition of the Saxon element 
in the English language at the time that Chaucer com- 
menced his literary career; let us notice briefly the 
accessions w T hich it received at different periods from 
Normandy. 

As the language of the Anglo-Saxons was complete in 
every essential respect, and had sufficed- for the purposes 
of literary composition of diverse kinds, as well as for 
all the necessities of society, long before they had sus- 
tained any intimate relation to their Norman neighbours, 
there existed no inducement to alter its original and radi- 
cal character, or even to deviate from its established forms. 
Consequently (as has just been pointed out), in all the 
essential parts of speech, the distinctive peculiarities of 
the Saxon idiom were retained without exception, while 
the numbers of French words that from time to time 



92 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

were introduced were assimilated either immediately or 
gradually to the Saxon idiom. 

Sixth. The words thus introduced were principally 
nouns substantive, adjectives, verbs, and participles. The 
adverbs, which are derived from French adjectives, seem 
to have been formed from them after they were Angli- 
cized, as they have all the Saxon termination liche or ly, 
instead of the French merit. As to the other indeclina- 
ble parts of speech, our language being sufficiently rich 
in its own resources, has borrowed nothing from France 
except an interjection or two. The nouns substantive 
in the French language (as in all the Romance dialects) 
had dropped their case endings long before the period of 
which we are at present speaking, but such of them as 
were naturalized in England acquired a genitive case, 
according to the corrupted Saxon form. The plural 
number was also new modelled to the same form, if ne- 
cessary ; for in the nouns ending in e feminine (as the 
greater part of the French did), the two languages were 
already agreed. Nominative flour, genitive flour es* 
plural floures. Nominative dam,e, genitive dam,es, plu- 
ral dames. On the contrary, the adjectives, which in 
their native land had a distinction of gender and num- 
ber, upon their naturalization in England seem generally 
to have lost both, and to have assumed the simple form 
of the English adjective, without case, gender, or num- 
ber. The French verbs laid aside all their differences of 
conjugation ; accorder, souffrir, recevoir, descendre were 
regularly changed into accorden, sujfren, receiven, de- 
scenden. They brought with them only two tenses, the 
present and the past, nor did they retain any peculiarity 
of inflexion which could distinguish them from verbs of 
Saxon origin. The participle of the present time, in 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF CHAUCEK. 93 

some verbs, appears to have preserved its French form, 
as usant y suffisant. The participle of the past time 
adopted almost universally the regular Saxon termina- 
tion in ed, as accorded, received, descended. It even fre- 
quently assumed the prepositive particle $e (or y, as it 
was afterwards written), which, among the Saxons, was 
generally, though not peculiarly, prefixed to that parti- 
ciple. 

Upon the whole it may be affirmed that at the time of 
which we are speaking, although the structure of our 
language was still Saxon, the vocabulary was to a con- 
siderable extent French. The Conquest (1066) intro- 
duced many novelties ; the mechanical arts, the civil 
law, the sciences, geography, medicine, alchemy, astrol- 
ogy, all brought with them their respective nomen- 
clatures derived from the French and Latin tongues. 
The poets, who generally have the principal share in 
moulding and refining a language, introduced a great 
number of words from France. As they were, for a long 
period, chiefly translators, this expedient saved them 
the trouble of seeking out the cognate terms in Saxon. 
The French words were descended from a polished 
language, and were much better adapted to metrical uses 
than the Saxon ; the final syllables of the French 
chimed together with more frequent consonances, and 
its accentual system, which tended to place the stress of 
the voice upon the final syllable, was better adapted to 
rhyming verse.* 

* Tyrwhitt's Introduction to Chaucer. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWER. 

In the preceding chapter we indicated the general 
condition of the language about the time of Chaucer 
and Cower. We must now consider that particular 
form of the language in which their works were com- 
posed. This, in consequence of their influence and 
popularity, as well as the excellence and the superiority 
of their poetry, acquired the preeminence as the standard 
of literature, and constituted the King's English, or lit- 
erary form of the tongue. Henceforth the other dialects 
descend to mere patois, and all other English gradually 
becomes provincial. 

The brilliant genius, the lofty social position of Chau- 
cer, as well as his harmonious adjustment of the native 
and foreign element in the vocabulary, and his fine ver- 
bal discrimination, were principally instrumental in ele- 
vating the East Midland dialect to the ascendency. The 
fame of Gower rests principally upon the accuracy and 
precision of his rhyme and vocabulary, which contributed 
efficaciously to determine the form of the language. 
The greater part of his works was composed in French ; 
in literary merit he was far inferior to his great contem- 
porary, nor does he appear to have written in English 
until encouraged by his example. The language which 
Chaucer adopted, and which by his influence became the 
standard form of the speech, was the East Midland dia- 



THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWER. 95 

lect, in which Orm and Robert of Brunne had also writ- 
ten. This dialect, formed by the blending of Anglian 
and Danish terms and constructions, had gradually ex- 
tended further and further southward, until it supplanted 
the original Southern speech, which had steadily receded 
before its irresistible advance. Its complete ascendency, 
however, was not established until long after the time 
of Chaucer. During the Wars of the Roses, the lan- 
guage manifested a strong tendency to resolve itself into 
its dialectic forms. Northern terms and idioms again 
appeared, and it was reserved for a Kentish man and 
his printing-press to consummate the task which had 
been commenced by Robert of Brunne and continued 
by "Wycliffe and Chaucer. The East Midland dialect, as 
we have pointed out, had assumed a simple analytic 
form, like our modern English. This was in great 
measure owing to its attrition with the Danish speech 
and the consequent falling away of its inflections. It 
had largely absorbed the French element, had been cul- 
tivated by Orm, a rare genius and our first orthoepical 
reformer, and in the hands of Robert of Brunne it 
assumed a character which differs slightly from our 
modern idioms. In the time of Chaucer it had become 
the literary language of London and of Oxford, and was 
current among persons of courtly rank and in the higher 
classes of society. It combined all the essential elements 
of a great language. The vigour of the antique Roman, 
the heroic enterprise of the Dane, the versatile genius 
of the Norman, were felicitously blended in the compo- 
sition of the races by whose commingling the speech of 
Spenser and of Shakspere was gradually formed. The 
French element had been in great measure introduced 
before the commencement of Chaucer's literary career, 



96 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

and was probably familiar to the greatest number of 
those for whom he wrote. We have elsewhere endea- 
voured to defend him from the old and oft-repeated com- 
plaint of corrupting the purity of his native tongue by 
the introduction of French words. 

The necessities of metre and of rhyme, which had. 
now become an established feature of English verse ; the 
fearful losses which the poetic, moral^ and intellectual 
vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon had sustained during the 
long period of its depression ; its scarcity of rhyming 
words, rendered recourse to the tongue of France indis- 
pensable to poetic success. A large proportion of the 
French words employed by Chaucer and Gower are 
those which have the rhyming syllables at the end of 
the lines. Chaucer, then, did not introduce into the 
English tongue French words which it already rejected, 
but he impressed the greater part of those previously in 
use with the sanction of his authority, and thus invested 
them with all the rights of native-born English vocables. 
He was not the creator of our vocabulary, but rather its 
umpire or arbiter, and by his happy faculty of selection 
and his appreciation of the necessities of the speech, he 
constructed out of existing materials a literary diction 
which, in all the essentials of poetic art, was, at that era, 
unsurpassed in any of the cultivated languages of 
Europe. The excellence of Chaucer's judgment, and 
his perfect comprehension of the needs of the language, 
are strikingly illustrated by the fact that, of the French 
words found in his writings, not much above one hun- 
dred have become obsolete,* while a much greater num- 



* Of the French words introduced by Langlande, many took no 
root, such as brocage, creaunt, fenestres, devoir, losengerie. In senti- 
ment and poetic spirit there is a much closer connection between 






THE AGE OF CHAUCER AtfD GOWER. 97 

ber of Anglo-Saxon words contained in his works have 
fallen completely into disuse. In fact, the number of 
French words introduced by Chaucer is much fewer 
than is commonly supposed, and his rare discrimination 
is manifest in his selection of native as well as of foreign 
terms. English he employed from preference ; French, 
from the metrical defects of the Saxon and the conse- 
quent necessity for recourse to French models of versifi- 
cation ; and his deviations from the pure English idiom 
are of rare occurrence. The language of Gower does 
not differ essentially from that of his great contempo- 
rary. It is not so purely English in style, and it con- 
tains a larger proportion of French words. His real 
merit is that of a linguistic refiner, rather than a poet of 
genuine excellence ; and his precise and accurate rhyme 
exercised a marked influence in moulding and determin- 
ing the literary form of the language. 

Piers the Plowman and Chaucer than exists between Chaucer and 
Gower, who have little in common except that they compose in the 
same language, and in a style different from their contemporaries 
and predecessors. The true distinction between Langlande and 
Chaucer is linguistic rather than poetic ; the former seems to have 
blended imperfectly the conflicting elements in the vocabulary, 
while his illustrious successor has fused them so skilfully and har- 
moniously, that the foreign terms appear as native-born words. The 
one was a genuine poet ; the other was not only a poet, but a word- 
artist of unsurpassed penetration and perception. 

5 



CHAPTEE XII. 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWER (continued). 

Under the guidance of Chaucer, the tongue of Eng- 
land advanced at once to -that preeminence which it 
maintains among the languages of Europe. Its vocabu- 
lary, hitherto unregulated and fluctuating, was now re- 
duced to order; one form of speech constituted the 
standard of literary composition; its metrical capabili- 
ties were tested and expanded ; the age of English litera- 
ture had fairly commenced. 

We are now in a position to understand the true rela- 
tion of English to its various patois or provincial dia- 
lects. The patois were those dialects of the language 
which received no perceptible infusion of French, but 
remained unaffected by foreign admixture. It must not 
be supposed, however, that they passed into mere pro- 
vincial forms without leaving any distinct impression 
upon the standard speech. On the contrary, many of 
the characteristic peculiarities of the literary idiom are 
traceable to dialectic influence. Their impress is espe- 
cially perceptible in our complex and discrepant system 
of orthography, whose anomalies are clearly due to the 
fusion of many dialects into one, and the preservation in 
the standard tongue of their orthographical diversities 
and discordances. 

The writings of Chaucer and Gower were the first 
specimens of truly national as well as truly English 



THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWER. 99 

literature. An harmonious and generally received lan- 
guage, a unity of national spirit, writings comprehensive 
in their scope and character, and discussing topics intel- 
ligible to the majority of educated persons, are the 
indispensable conditions of a truly national literature. 
These conditions were fulfilled during the latter half of 
the . fourteenth century, and in great measure by the 
influence of Chaucer and Gower. It is from this period 
that we must date the commencement of that magnifi- 
cent and incomparable literature which is the richest 
inheritance of the English-speaking race. 

The poetic models upon whom Chaucer founded his 
style were principally those of France. They were 
everywhere, perhaps, still regarded as the classic poetry 
of modern times; and the younger poetry of Italy, 
which was derived from the same common source, 
had not, with all its excellence, either supplanted the 
ballads and romances of the trouveres and troubadours, 
or even attained a corresponding eminence. The 
earliest English, as well as the earliest Italian, poetry 
was principally imitated or translated from that 
of France. The greater part of the poetry written 
in the French language during the eleventh, twelfth, 
and thirteenth centuries, was written in England 
for English readers, and to a considerable extent 
by' native poets. French poetry, during this period, 
does not appear to have been regarded as a foreign 
literature, and even at a subsequent era it must have 
been considered by every cultivated Englishman as prop- 
erly belonging to his own land. For a hundred years 
before the time of Chaucer, perhaps even longer, the 
majority of English versifiers had been occupied in 
translating the French romances into English, now 



100 



HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



gradually, but steadily, becoming the common speech of 
the educated. These translations were executed with 
little accuracy, and were designed merely to render the 
meaning of the original intelligible to the English 
reader. During the latter half of the fourteenth cen- 
tury, at which time Chaucer began to write, the French 
had nearly disappeared as a general medium of commu- 
nication ; the. English, on the contrary, had improved 
decidedly in precision, regularity, and in general adapta- 
tion to the purposes of literary composition.* Chaucer 
was probably more indebted to the Troubadour or Pro- 
ven gal poets than to any other foreign sources, for pol- 
ished and appropriate models of poetic style. Under 
the guidance of this wonderful race of minstrels, poetry 
had attained an artistic elegance and perfection unsur- 
passed, if not unapproached, in ancient or modern ages, 
and from the lovely land of Provence the inspiration of 
the Muse had extended into many distant climes ; the 
Troubadour poetry supplied the models upon which that 
of Germany, Italy, and that of their successors, the 
Trouveres of Northern France, were constructed. 
Their influence upon the literature of mediaeval Europe 
was immense ; they were the acknowledged standards 
of poetic excellence, and it was among them that the lit- 
erature of modern times first appeared, radiant with 
hope and vigour, after the long and dreary period 
that had intervened since the fall of the Roman Em- 
pire. 

The two periods in Provengal or Troubadour history 
extend from the second half of the eighth century to 
1080, and frojn 1080 to 1350. Of these, the second is 



* Craik's English Literature. 



THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND GOWEK. 101 

by far the more important, as it was during this era that 
the Provencal poetry flourished in its greatest excellence 
and popularity. The Anglo-Norman literature, intro- 
duced into Eugland by the conquerours, had two points 
of contact with the Provengals ; one of which was fur- 
nished by its general and indirect relations to France ; 
the other, through the Kings of England, who had be- 
come Dukes of France, and who maintained habitual 
communication with several of the provinces of the 
South. The literature of the Provengals had thus two 
avenues open by which to penetrate into Great Britain. 
Henry II. and his sons distinguished themselves by their 
zeal for the encouragement of the Troubadours. His 
queen, Eleanor of (xuienne, drew several of them after 
her, and, among others, one of the most famous, Bernard 
de Yentadour. Notwithstanding these propitious in- 
fluences, the Provengals exerted but little effect upon 
the Anglo-Norman literature. The latter can show 
nothing which can be compared with the' lyrical produc- 
tions of the former. As to poetical romances, the Anglo- 
Normans composed several of them, they translated 
others, and they were acquainted with several more 
through the medium of French translations. By the 
side of this Anglo-Norman literature, which was proper- 
ly that of the court and the conquerours, there arose 
another in the language of the country, and this was the 
literature of the people. The Provengal literature is 
more apparent in the latter than in the former.* It was 
upon the models furnished by these brilliant and gifted 
versifiers that Chaucer refined our native tongue, 
smoothed down its roughness, expanded its capabilities, 

* Fauriel's " History of Proven9al Literature." 



102 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

developed its metrical powers, and polished its modes 
and styles of versification. 

As we have already pointed out, alliteration was the 
essential characteristic of Anglo-Saxon verse, though 
rhyme was occasionally employed. Rhyme appears to 
be the form which poetry spontaneously assumes ; it is, 
in fact, coeval with poetry itself. Its existence was as 
well known to Yirgil and Horace as to Dry den and 
Pope. It was resorted to in ancient Roman poetry, 
both in compositions of an elevated and dignified char- 
acter, and in caricature, satire, and ribaldry. "It may 
be discovered in Homer, in ^Eschylus, in Horace, and 
Ovid. Its employment is commented upon by Cicero 
and Quintilian, and the Greek rhetoricians. It is found 
in Prudentius, in Leo Diaconus, and in nearly all the 
intervening Latin poets, before it appears in full blos- 
som in the hymns of the middle ages. "With the disre- 
gard of quantity, the obscuration of inflections, and the 
increasing instability of accent, among mixed and im- 
perfectly educated races, rhyme became a customary 
and almost indispensable ornament of verse in the later 
Latin and Greek." But in the classic poetry of an- 
tiquity, the rhythmical principle exerted too great an in- 
fluence to allow the rhyme, as a rhetorical element, to 
attain that influence which it gained by a natural pro- 
cess when verses began to be measured according to the 
modern principle of rhetorical accent. Rhythm showed 
its influence in ancient poetry, not only in the single 
verses, but in the composition of several verses of a dif- 
ferent size and fall, into an organic whole — the strophe. 
To the inheritance of the strophe, and its development 
into the stanza, mediaeval poems, and especially the can- 
zas of the Troubadours, owe their greatest interest. To 



THE AGE OF CHAUCEE AND GOWER. 103 

the relics of ancient literature, already mentioned, was 
added the rhyme, defined by strict rules and made ob- 
ligatory, and this new principle contributed not a little 
to give variety and harmony to the highest development 
of mediaeval poetry, the stanza.* 

In Saxon poetry, alliteration constituted the chief 
metrical characteristic, but even there, rhyme was occa- 
sionally employed, and it is assuming too much to assert 
that English poetry is entirely indebted to Norman- 
French for its introduction, as it was known and prac- 
tised to some extent before the Conquest, f Among the 
earlier examples of its use, may be mentioned the Anglo- 
Saxon rhyming poem, discovered by Conybeare, and 
written about the close of the tenth century; lines in 
rhyme in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, upon the death of 
William the Conquerour ; and a rhyming canticle, com- 
posed before 1170. In the reign of Henry II., Laya- 
mon's "Chronicle of Brutus" appeared, which contained 
occasional specimens of rhyming verse. 

From the end of Henry III.'s reign ^ to the middle of 
the fourteenth century, soon after which time Chaucer 
began to write, the number of English rhymers had 
greatly increased. In addition to several with whose 
names we are acquainted — Robert of Gloucester, Robert 
of Brunne, Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hamphole, 

* North British Eeview, January, 1871. 

f Otfrid of Weissenberg, who nourished about 870, was the earli- 
est rhymer in any of the modern languages of Europe. 

| The decline in English rhyme, from the time of Henry II. to the 
end of Henry III.'s reign, is accounted for by the supposition that 
during this period the poets, who wrote for the fashionable, com- 
posed in French, scholars in Latin, while the Saxon poetry, being 
intended for the ignorant classes, was of a very inferior character, 
and has fallen into oblivion. — TyrwhitVs Introduction to Chaucer. 



104 HISTOKY OP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

and Lawrence Minot — it is probable that many of the 
anonymous authors, or rather translators of the popular 
poems, called Romances, existed during this era. As 
their poems were intended for recitation, perhaps to be 
accompanied by music, they probably were more atten- 
tive to the metre than to the rhyme. 

Such was the general condition of English poetry 
about the time that Chaucer entered upon his literary 
career. Rhyme was gradually becoming a feature of 
versification, and was perhaps as generally recognized 
as blank verse was, at the time that Shakspere com- 
menced the writing of his dramas. Although its intro- 
duction was not due to Norman-French poetiy, its gen- 
eral acceptance and popularity were greatly accelerated 
by its superior adaptation to the purposes of metrical 
composition in a language like the French, in which the 
stress or emphasis is placed near to the ultimate syllable, 
or upon it. 

After a short and ineffectual struggle, as well as an 
attempt at compromise, between the ancient alliterative 
system and the new rhyming verse, the latter prevailed, 
and maintained the ascendency until the latter decades 
of the sixteenth century. 

So far as rhyme was concerned, little remained to be 
done by Chaucer except to lend the sanction of his au- 
thority to the example of his predecessors, and by his 
influence rhyming verse was firmly established as an 
essential element in our poetry. The metrical part of 
our language was capable of improvement by refining 
the modes of versification already adopted, as well as by 
the introduction of new styles. In this regard, Chaucer 
rendered illustrious service. He was the introducer of 
the heroic metre, and our metrical forms, inspired with 



THE AGE OF CHAUCER A1STD GOWER. 105 

new life by his talismanic touch, rang out with sweet 
notes, as clear and unfading, after the flight of five cen- 
turies, as the images of the Canterbury pilgrims. 

Having thus traced the rise and formation of the 
King's English, under the guidance of Chaucer, and, in 
a less degree, of Gower, let us see if we may not at least 
catch the echo of those melodious sounds whose dulcet 
symphonies preluded the future glories of the English 
tongue. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE PRONUNCIATION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE 

AGE OF CHAUCER. 

With regard to the pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon, 
little can be ascertained. It is probable that it resembled 
that of Latin, and its accentual system, which placed the 
•stress of the voice upon the root, and not* upon the in- 
flected syllables, caused the first syllables to be more 
forcibly enunciated than the last. In this respect it pre- 
sented a direct contrast to the French, which tended to 
place the stress of the voice toward the end of the word. 
By the influence of the Norman Conquest, a new accent- 
ual system was introduced, which, towards the close of the 
twelfth century, began to manifest itself in the written 
speech. The vocabulary of the French language is, to a 
great extent, composed of Latin words which have lost 
their inflectional endings, generally the atonic or unac- 
cented syllables. For example, the French noun, reeep- 
tion, is derived from the accusative case of the Latin noun, 
reception-em, by rejecting the inflected or unaccented 
syllable. The accented syllable of the Latin thus became 
the final syllable of the French word, and also the one 
upon which the stress of the voice was laid. When 
such words were transferred from French to English, 
they brought with them their native accentuation ; and 
as accent is much stronger in English than in French, 
the final syllable was doubtless much more distinctly 
pronounced in the former than in the latter language. 



PROXU^CIATIOK IX THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 107 

By the introduction of the accentual system of the 
French tongue, a disturbing element entered into our 
orthoepy, and the contest between the Gothic and Ro- 
mance tendencies in English is not yet harmoniously con- 
cluded. French accentuation even affected pure Eng- 
lish words; and we find wisliche' for wis'liche, begyn- 
ning' , endyng', absence', mercy', prayer ' , conquerour' , 
etc. Many French words, when Anglicized, receive a 
variable accent, as fortune, fortune', con'tre, contree', 
stat'ue, and statue' * 

In the days of Chaucer, the pronunciation of English, 
so far as it is now possible to reclaim it, seems to have 
been as follows : 

A=ah, as in father ; the Latin and Continental 
sound of a. The present sound of a, as in wait, late, 
was not established until the beginning of the eighteenth 
century. A short = ah, the short sound of ah, not now 
used in received English, but common in the provinces, 
Continental short a. The present very different pronun- 
ciation, as a in cat, was not in vogue until the seven- 
teenth century. Aa, the same as a long. Ai=ah'ee, a 
diphthong, consisting of ah, pronounced briefly, but with 
a stress, and gliding on to ee in one syllable ; the Ger- 
man sound of ai, and the French ai. The modern sound 
of ai, as in wait, was not in use before the seventeenth 
century. Au=ah'oo, a diphthong consisting of ah, pro- 



* This will be apparent to any one who will observe the varying 
pronunciation of such words as contem'plate, contemplate, demon- 
strate, demonstrate, conversant, convers'ant, etc. It was only in 
the last generation that Rogers remarked, " Bal'cony (pronounced 
before balco'ny) is bad enough, but con 'template makes me sick." 
In the United States, this tendency to place the accent as far as 
possible from the end of the word is especially marked. 



108 HISTORY OE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

nonnced briefly, but with a stress, and gliding on to oo 
in one syllable ; not now in use ; the German au, the 
French aou. The modern sound of au, as Paul, was 
not established until the seventeenth century. Aw= 
Au. Ay=Ai. 

B was pronounced as at present. 

C=k before a, o, u, or any consonant, and equal to 
s before e, i, y. It was never sounded sh, as in the 
present sound of vicious, which then formed three dis- 
tinct syllables, vi-ci-ous. Ch was pronounced as ch, in 
such, cheese. 

D was pronounced as at present. 

E long, as e in there, ai in pair, a in dare ; that is, as 
ai is now pronounced before r, or rather more broadly 
than before any other consonant, and without any ten- 
dency to run into ee, nearly French e. The sound of e 
in eel was not established until the beginning of the 
eighteenth century. E short, like e in met, pen, e final, 
like e, or short e, lightly and obscurely sounded, as the 
final e in the German eine, " herrliche," " gute," gabe. 
This sound was always used in prose when final e was 
the mark of some final vowel in older forms of the lan- 
guage, when it marked oblique cases, feminine genders, 
plural inflections of verbs, etc. But in poetry it was 
regularly elided altogether before a following vowel, and 
before he, his, him, hire, equal to her, here equal to 
their, hem equal to them, and sometimes before hath, 
hadde, have, hem, here, equal to here. It was never 
sounded in hire equal to her, here equal to their, oure 
equal to our, youre equal to your, and was often omitted 
in hadde equal to had, were, time, more. It was seldom 
omitted when necessary for the rhyme and metre, and 
for force of expression in other positions, especially when 



PKONUNCIATIOK" IK THE AGE OF CHAUCEK. 109 

it replaced an older vowel, or marked an oblique case, as 
in German. Its pronunciation fell into disuse during 
the fifteenth century. Ea had the same sound as long e, 
like ea in break, great, wear ; it was seldom used except 
in ease and please. The modern sound of ea, as ee in 
eel, was not in vogue until the eighteenth century. Ee 
the same as long e, as e'e in e'er, it frequently occurs. 
The modern sound of ee was not in general use before 
the middle of the sixteenth century ; ei equal to ai, with 
which it is often interchanged by scribes. The modern 
sound, as ee, dates from the eighteenth century. Eo 
equal to long e, seldom used but in people, often spelled 
pejpel. The modern sound of eo, as ee, came into use 
during the sixteenth century. Es final, mark of the 
plural, was generally sounded as es or is. Eu equal to ui 
in Scotch puir, the long sound of French u, German u 
in all words of French origin. This assumed the sound 
of our modern eu in the seventeenth century. In words 
not derived from French, eu equal to ai'oo, a diphthong 
consisting of ai, pronounced briefly, but with a stress, 
and gliding on to oo in one syllable, as in Italian Europa. 
Ew equal ui in Scotch puir, or else ai'oo precisely as eu. 
Ey, the same as ay, with which it is constantly inter- 
changed by scribes. The modern sound, as ee, belongs 
to the eighteenth century. 

F, as at present. 

G, equal to g hard in all non-French words ; equal to 
j before e, i, in words of French origin. Ge final, or 
before a, o, in French words equal to j ; the e is some- 
times omitted. Gh equal to kh, the Scotch and German 
sound of ch. 

H, initial, as at present, but probably generally 
omitted in unaccented he, his, him, hire equal to her, 



110 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

hem equal to them, and often in hath, hadde, have, just 
as, we still have, I've told 'em, and in some French 
words, as host, honour, etc., probably omitted as now. 
H final represents a very faint sound of the guttural 
kh, into which it dwindled before it became entirely 
extinct. 

I long was not at all the modern sound of i ; it was 
the lengthened sound of i in still, almost, but not quite, 
ee ; compare still and steal in saying, Still so gently o'er 
me stealing; I short equal to i in pin," pit; I consonant 
equal to j. Ie, the same as long e, with which it is 
often interchanged. The modern sound of e dates from 
the seventeenth century. 

K, as at present. 

L, as at present. Lh equal to simple 1. 

M, as at present. 

N, as at present; not nasalized in French words as 
now. Ng had three sounds as at present; as in sing, 
singer, linger, change. 

Oa equal to a in boar, o in more, with a broader sound 
than oa in moan, or o in stone. O short equal to oa, 
the Continental short <9, but not so broad as modern o in 
got, which was not established till the seventeenth cen- 
tury. Oa probably not in Chaucer ; it was introduced 
for long o in the sixteenth century. Oe occurs very 
rarely ; same as long e. Oi equal to oo'ee, a diphthong 
consisting of the sound of oo pronounced briefly, but 
with a stress, gliding on to ee in one syllable. Oo equal 
to long o ; often interchanged with it. The modern 
sound of oo in pool dates from the middle of the six- 
teenth century. On had three sounds which may be 
thus distinguished : ou equal to oo, where it is now pro- 
nounced as in loud j ou equal to u, where it is now pro- 



PROKU^CIATIO^ Itf THE AGE OF CHAUCER. Ill 

nounced as in double; ou equal to oa'oo, where it is now 
sometimes pronounced oh'oo, as in soul. Ow equal to ou. 
Oi equal to oi. 

P, as at present. Ph equal to f, as now. 

Qu, as at present. 

E, as in ring, herring, carry; always trilled; never 
now as in car,. serf, third, cord. Ee final, probably the 
same as er, except when e w r as inflectional. Eh equal 
to r, as at present. 

S was more frequently a sharp s when final ; then 
was, is, all had s sharp. But between two vowels, and 
when the final es had the e omitted after long vowels or 
voiced consonants, it was probably z, a letter sometimes 
interchanged with s, but rarely used. S was never sh 
or zh, as at present ; thus, vision had three syllables, 
vi-si-on. Sch equal to sh in shall. Sh as now. 

T, as at present, but final tion was in two syllables, 
si-ion. Th had two sounds, as in thine, then / probably 
sounded as now. 

U long occurred only in French words, and had the 
sound of French u, German ii. The modern sound of u 
in tune was not introduced until the seventeenth cen- 
tury. 

V consonant equal to v. Y vowel equal to u. Y con- 
sonant, as at present. 

W vowel was used in diphthongs as a substitute for u, 
and sometimes absolutely for oo, as wde equal to oode ; 
herberw equal to herberoo. W consonant, as at present. 

Y vowel, long and short, had just the same sound as I 
long and short. Y consonant, probably as now. 

Z equal to z, as now, and never zh.* 

* Ellis's Early English Pronunciation ; Morris's Chaucer. 



CHAPTEE XIY. 

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Haying traced the historical development of the Eng- 
lish tongue from its crude beginnings among the Ger- 
manic and Scandinavian colonists of Angle-land to the 
period of its full fruition under the culture of Chaucer, 
Gower, and Wycliffe, we must endeavour to ascertain, 
as accurately as possible, the elements by whose blend- 
ing the language was gradually formed, the time, the 
manner, and the conditions of their introduction. 

The vocabulary of the English language, while it has 
incorporated elements drawn from nearly all the known 
languages of the world, is principally composed of Teu- 
tonic or Germanic, Keltic, Latin, and Romance con- 
stituents. "We shall consider them principally with 
reference to the period of their introduction, and in the 
following order : First, the Keltic ; Second, the Latin, 
with its Romance descendant, the French ; Third, the 
Saxon or Germanic; Fourth, the Danish or Scandina- 
vian ; Fifth, the Greek ; Sixth, the words derived from 
miscellaneous sources.* 

* In enumerating the elements of the vocabulary, I have thought 
it best to classify French as part of the indirect Latin element, al- 
though it necessitates a departure from the chronological order, 
Saxon, in point of time, coming before French. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 113 



The Keltic. 

It is a prevalent misapprehension that the Kelts, the 
primitive inhabitants of Britain, were almost extirpated 
by the Saxon invaders, and that the language and the 
people faded away without leaving a perceptible impres- 
sion upon the tongues and the nationalities by which 
they were supplanted. But this is at variance with the 
facts; many local names in England, and some in 
America, attest the influence of the Keltic races, and 
remind us forcibly of their long sway in those lands in 
which English is now the dominant speech, while the 
number of designations of the most common articles, 
occurring in every day's ordinary intercourse, strikingly 
recalls their memory and their presence. 

Local names derived from Keltic : Avon, Derwent, 
London, Ouse, Medlock / Aber y prefixed to names of 
places on or near the water, Aberdeen, Aberconway, 
Havre / Yar or Gar, in Yarborough, Yarmouth, Yar- 
combe / the same word occurs in Garonne, Garumna 
river ; Penrose, Pendell, Torbay, Torquay, Arden, Ar- 
dennes / Nant, in Nantes, Bangor / Isle of Wight, Isle 
of Man. 

A number of Keltic terms were introduced into Anglo- 
Saxon, and have thus passed over into the English. 
Such are, brock (badger), breeches, clout, cradle, crock, 
crook, glen, kiln, mattock. 

Keltic words still existing in English : ballast, boast, 
bod-(kin), bog, bother, bribe, cam (crooked, used by 
Shakspere), crag, dainty, dandriff, darn, daub, dirk, gyve, 
havoc, kibe, log, loop, maggot, mop, motley, mug, nog- 
gin, nod, pillow, scrag, spigot, squeal, squall. 

Keltic words of recent introduction : bannock, bard, 



114 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

brogue, clan, claymore (great sword), clog, log, Druid, 
gag, pibroch, plaid, pony, shamrock, slab, whisky. 

A number of Keltic words were brought over to Eng- 
land in the Norman-French tongue, and consequently 
perpetuated in the English. The Northern French, 
which was a Neo-Latin dialect, contained several thou- 
sand Keltic words, many of which are retained in the 
standard French language. The widely extended pre- 
dominance of the Keltic, its contact, and to some extent, 
its commingling with the Latin, produced by war, con- 
quest, and colonization, caused it to enter into the Neo- 
Latin or Romance dialects, as a modifyiug element ; and it 
maybe laid down as a general rule, that whatever grammat- 
ical differences exist between the ancient Latin and the 
Neo-Latin tongues of Gaul, are traceable to its influence.* 
Many of the characteristic peculiarities of the French 
are clearly of Keltic origin. Again, as nearly all French 
words, not derived from Latin or Teutonic sources, have 
their roots in the Keltic, so nearly all English words, not 
derived from the Teutonic, the French, the classic lan- 
guages, the Scandinavian tongues, nor from the miscellane 
ous sources hereafter to be indicated, are of Keltic origin. 

Keltic words introduced by Norman-French : bag, 
barren, barter, barrator, barrel, basin, basket, bassinet, 
bonnet, bucket, boots, bran, brisket, button, chemise, clap- 
per, dagger, gravel, gown, harness, marl, mitten, motley, 
osier, pot, possnet, rogue, ribbon, skain (skein), tike. 

Latin of the First Period, b. c. 55-a. d. 447. 

The Latin words in the vocabulary of the English lan- 
guage were introduced at different epochs, and under 

* Schneider, Geschicte der Englischen Sprache. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 115 

different linguistic, literary, and political conditions. 
The First Roman Period embraces the interval between 
the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar, b. c. 55, and 
the final withdrawal of the Roman legions, a. d. 447. 

With regard to the Latin words introduced during this 
period, a diversity of opinion exists. The majority of 
the historians of the language, and of writers upon the 
Science of Language, incline to the belief, that, except 
a few military terms and local names — stratum, street, 
(Stratford), cester, castrum, Lancaster, Gloucester, coin, 
colonia, Lincoln, pont, pons, Pont-e-fract, (Pom-fret) — - 
our tongue received no accessions from the Latin during 
the long period of Roman dominion. But with all pos- 
sible deference to the judgments of the accomplished 
scholars who adopt this view, it seems unsupported by 
trustworthy historical testimony, and directly at variance 
with the evidence of the language itself. 

The general diffusion of the Latin language was one 
of the most potent auxiliaries employed by the Roman 
power in the extension of its sway, and in assimilat- 
ing the conquered provinces to the Roman character,* 
Community of language and of laws constituted a pow- 
erful instrument in welding together into a coherent and 
organized mass the various races and nationalities, over 

* " Rarely, if ever, did the barbarian conqueror dare, when acting as 
a ruler, to speak his native language ; he endangered his royal caste 
unless he comported himself like a Roman on the throne ; the very 
sound of the Latin language implied supremacy and command. The 
Latin was the only recognized vehicle of official business in the 
Romano-barbarian states ; the sovereigns of Teutonic blood promul- 
gated their laws, asserted their prerogatives, bestowed their bounties, 
or rebuked their people, in the language of the Caesars. Capitulars, 
statutes, rescripts, charters, all public documents, are written in La- 
tin." — Palgrave's Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth. 



116 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

which the symbols of her empire were gradually extend- 
ing. The Latin by degrees supplanted the native 
dialects throughout the provinces, and there is no reason 
that Britain should have formed an exception to the 
general rule. The historical testimonies are abundant to 
the effect that Britain was thoroughly Romanized, and 
received an abiding impress of Roman arts, culture, and 
language. After the reign of Claudius, the rigour of 
Roman tyranny seems to have yielded to a milder and 
more tolerant policy ; and when the privileges of Roman 
citizenship were conferred upon all the Provincials by 
Caracallus, the Briton entered upon the possession of 
his rights without molestation. The long intervals of si- 
lence respecting the affairs of Britain, attest the tranquil- 
lity of the island, and the prosperity of its inhabitants, 
consequent upon the relaxation of Roman rule, and there 
are many unmistakable indications of friendly intercom- 
munication between conquerors and conquered. The 
readiness with which the islanders acquired the language, 
as well as the arts, the culture, and the elegancies of 
the capital, is especially commented upon by Tacitus, 
and seems to have excited his wonder, if not to have 
aroused his suspicion. The Latin tongue, the great 
medium of literature, of diplomacy, and of intercourse, 
was acquired with eagerness, and the youth of Britain 
became ambitious of excelling in eloquence. In Gaul it 
had superseded the Keltic, and the forensic skill of the 
Gauls passed over the Channel into the neighbouring 
land. It was almost impossible that Britain should not 
have been imbued with a strong colouring of the Roman 
tongue ; and we discover that a very considerable num- 
ber of words, names of trees, flowers, herbs, designations 
of weights and measures, and of the ordinary appliances 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 117 

of daily life, were introduced into the Keltic tongue from 
Rome, transferred to the Anglo-Saxon invaders by the 
Romanized Briton, and are thus perpetuated in the vo- 
cabulary of the English language.* The following are 
the Latin terms introduced into the island during the 
First Roman Period. 



Anglo-Saxon. 


Latin. 


English. 


Ince, 


Ulna, 


Ell. 


Mil, 


Mille (passuum), 


Mile. 


Carta, 


Charta, 


Paper. 


Pinn, 


Penna, 


Pen. 


Line, 


Linea, 


Line. 


Circol, 


Circulus, 


Circle. 


Demum, 


Damnum, 


Damage. 


Profian, 


Probare, 


Prove. 


Wed, 


Vadium, 


Pledge. 


Sign, 


Signum, 


Sign. 


Coc, 


Coquus, 


Cook. 


Cycene, 


Coquina, 


Kitchen. 


Disc, 


Discus, 


Dish. 



* As a proof of the extent to which Britain had become Roman- 
ized, it may be said, that boxes of Roman quack medicines are still 
disinterred, and spurious coin is found in quantities that induce us 
to regard it as a device of the imperial treasury. There was no 
country which received a deeper impression from Roman civilization 
and Roman architecture than Britain. The stately towers, the thea- 
tres, the baths, which remained undestroyed for centuries, exciting 
the wonder of the chronicler and the traveller ; the edifices which, 
even in the fourteenth century, were so numerous and so magnifi- 
cent as almost to surpass any others on this side of the Alps ; the 
numerous legends respecting the Trojan origin of the Britons, 
strikingly attest the abiding influence of the Roman occupation, the 
intercommunication and commingling of Kelt and Roman, and the 
consequent effect of the speech of the victors upon the speech of 
the vanquished. Upon these points I would advise the student to 
consult Pearson's "England in the Middle Ages," and Palgrave's 
' ' Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth." 



118 



HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



Anglo- Saxon. 


Latin. 


English. 


Taefl, 


Tabula, 


Table. 


Setl, 


Sedile, 


Seat. 


Synder, 


Cineres, 


Ashes. 


Cyse, 


Caseus, 


Cheese. 


Ele, 


Oleum, 


Oil. 


Eced, 


Acetum, 


Vinegar. 


Win, 


Vinum, 


Wine. 


Ostre, 


Ostreum, 


Oyster. 


Cancer, 


Cancer, 


Crab. 


Candel, 


Candela, 


Candle. 


Cyl, 


Culeus, 


Sack. *— 


Cyst, 


Cista, 


Chest. 


Socc, 


Soccus, 


Sock. 


Ongul, 


Ahgulus, 


Hook. 


• Balistas, 


Balista, 


Balista. 


Ceaster, 


Castrum, 


Camp. 


Port, 


Portus, 


Port. 


Straet, 


Strata, 


Street. 


Weall, 


Vallum, 


Wall. 


Mur, 


Murus, 


Wall. 


Tempel, 


Templum, 


Temple. 


Scolu, 


Schola, 


School. 


Cite, 


Ci vitas, 


City. 


Municep, 


Municipium, 


A borough., 


Carcern, 


Career, 


A prison. 4 


Camp, 


Campus, 


A field. 


Aecer, 


Ager, 


A sown field. 


Munt, 


Mons, 


Hill (mount). 


Funt, 


Fons, 


Fountain. 


Lac, 


Lacus, 


Lake. 


Baron, 


Vir, varo, 


A man. 


Wencle, 


Ancilla, 


Maid. 


Wydewe, 


Vidua, 


Widow. 


Sol, 


Solea, 


A sole or sandal 


Scol-maegistre, 


Scholae magister. 


Schoolmaster. 


Mynet, 


Moneta, 


Mint. 


Piind, 


Pondus, 


Pound. 


Elu, 


Ulna, 


Ell. 


Ince, 


Uncia, 


Ounce. 


Pil, 


Pilum, 


Dart. 









THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 119 



Anglo-Saxon. 


Latin. 


English. 


Craesta, 


Crista, 


A crest. * 


Geoc, 


Iugum, 


Yoke. 


Calc, 


Calc, 


Lime. 


Tern, 


Temo, 


Team. 


Spad, 


Spata, 


Spade. 


Fann, 


Vannus, 


Fan. 


Fore, 


Furca, 


Fork. 


Maeth, 


Messis (meto), 


A mowing. 


Pic, 


Pix, 


Pitch. 


Fraene, 


Fraenum, 


Rein. 


Aer, es, 


iEs, aeris, 


Brass. 


Tigol, 


Tegula, 


Tile. 


Ancer, 


Anchora, 


Anchor. 


Ort-geard, 


Hortus, 


Garden, orchard. 


Rose, 


Rosa, 


Rose. 


Lilie, 


Lilium, 


Lily. 


Peru, 


Pyrus, 


Pear. 


Fie, 


Ficus, 


Fig. 


Casten-(bean), 


Castanus, 


Chestnut. 


Persoc-(treow), 


Persica, 


Peach. 


Mor-(beam), 


Morus, 


Mulberry. 


Laur-(beam), 


Laurus, 


Laurel. 


Pine-(treow), 


Pinus, 


Pine. 


Bux, 


Buxum, 


Box-tree. 


Lin, 


Linum, 


Flax. 


Pipbr, 


Piper, 


Pepper. 


Pionie, 


Paeonia, 


Paeony. 


Cucumer, 


Cucumis, 


Cucumber. 


Cawe, 


Caulis, 


Cabbage. 


Raedic, 


Radix, 


Radish. 


Sin-fulle, 


Cinquefolium, 


Cinquefoil. 


Mul, 


Mulus, 


Mule. 


Stemn, 


Stemma, 


Stem. 


Crisp, 


Crispus, 


Crisp. 


False, 


Falsus, 


False.* 



* Pearson's " England in the Early and Middle Ages." Appendix 
to Vol. I. 



120 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



Latin of the Second Period. 

The Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity 
about the close of the sixth century. Between that 
time and the Norman Conquest (1066), many Latin 
words were introduced, pertaining chiefly to ecclesiasti- 
cal affairs and the ritual of the church. Mynster, a 
minster, monasterium ; portic, a porch, portions ; cluster, 
a cloister, claustrum / murine, a monk, monachus / Ms- 
ceop, a bishop, episcopus; a/rcehisceop, archbishpp, archie- 
piscopus* sanct, a saint, sanctus; profost, a provost, pro- 
positus / pall, a pall, pallium • colic, a chalice, calix ; 
psalter, a psalter, psalterium / maesse, a mass, missa / 
pistel, an epistle, epistola y praedician, to preach, prc&- 
dicare. Also the designation of some foreign plants and 
animals; camell, a camel, camelus; elylp, elephant, ele- 
phas / peter selige, parsley, petroselinum ; ftferfuge, 
feverfew, febrifuga. 

Third Latin Period. — Mediaeval Latinity. 

The influence of the Mediaeval Latinity has profound- 
ly affected the vocabulary of the English language. 
Throughout the dark and middle ages Latin constituted 
the medium of jurisprudence, of theology, of the scho- 
lastic philosophy, and of science. The boundless 
variety of new conceptions, evoked by the new condi- 
tions of society in the process of transition from ancient 
to modern times, demanded adequate forms of expres- 
sion. These could only be obtained by the creation of 
new words out of pre-existing Latin materials, a task 
which was gradually accomplished by the labours of the 
schoolmen, the ecclesiastics, the theologians, and the 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 121 

civilians. Hence arose that strange product known as 
Mediaeval Latin, in which are embodied the far-reach- 
ing wisdom of Roger Bacon, the manly sentiments of 
Grostete, and which has tended essentially to enrich the 
vocabulary of the English tongue.* 

Our Mediaeval Latin words were principally intro- 
duced between the Conquest, 1066, and the Revival 
of Learning. Their number and character have not, 
thus far, been accurately determined. 

Many Latin words were introduced by the chroniclers 
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A large 
Latin element was indirectly introduced through the 
Norman-French, which was a Neo-Latin or Romance 
dialect. 

Fourth Latin Period. — From the Revival of Liter- 
ature to the. Present Time. 

This includes the Latin words which originated in the 
writings of scholars, reformers, and of learned men in 
general. The words introduced during this period may 
be distinguished from those of the preceding: First. They 

* The rise of theology, scholastic philosophy, and jurisprudence, 
demanded an immense number of new words for the adequate ex- 
pression of the new ideas which they had called into existence. The 
Latin tongue was remarkably defective in abstract nouns ; these 
were supplied principally by Tertullian and the Latin fathers ; 
Jerome contributed powerfully to the formation of ecclesiastical 
Latin by his translation of the Scriptures into that language (Vul- 
gate) ; the schoolmen introduced many philosophical terms ; the 
civilians, many legal words and phrases. Latin was the general 
medium of learning and of science for a long period even after the 
Revival of Learning. It was within a comparatively recent era that 
the vernacular tongues of Europe were advanced to that preemi- 
nence which they occupy at present. 

6 



122 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

retain more accurately the form, and, in -many cases, the 
inflections of the original language. Not having passed 
through the French, they are free from that compres- 
sion and attenuation of form which is produced by the 
action of phonetic decay. Second. They relate to objects 
and ideas for which the increase in the range of science 
and of learning required expression. The Latin ele- 
ment introduced through the French, and that which is 
derived directly from the original, may be illustrated by 
comparing the following words. 

Ancestor and antecessor, sampler and exemplar, beni- 
son and benediction, conceit and conception, constraint 
and construction, defeat and defect, forge and fabric, 
integer and entire, invidious and envious, extraneous 
and strange, fact and feat, malison and malediction, 
mayor and major, nourishment and nutriment, poor 
and pauper, orison and oration, proctor and procurator, 
purveyance and providence, ray and radius, respite and 
respect, retreat and retract, sir and senior, surface and 
superficies, sure and secure, treason and tradition. 

From the Latin we obtain a large proportion of our 
moral and intellectual vocabulary, our terms for the ex- 
pression of abstract relations and conceptions. The 
Latin words may generally be distinguished from those 
of native growth by the class of ideas which they de- 
note, by their greater length (the Saxon words being on 
an average less than half as long as the Latin), and by 
their peculiar prefixes and suffixes, a list of which is in- 
serted. Latin prefixes : a, ab, abs, from, as avert, ab- 
jnre ; ad, a, ac, af ag, at, an, ap, ar, as, at, to, as ad- 
duce, recede, afftx ; ante, before, as antecedent ; circum, 
about, as circumjacent', con, co, cog, col, com, cor, to- 
gether, wdth, as conform, colloquy, <%>eval; contra, 



THE VOCABULAKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 123 

against, as contradict; de, down, from, as Ascend, de- 
fame ; dis, asunder, as dissever, disrupt ; e, ex, out of, 
expel, #ject; extra, beyond, as extraordinary ; in, ig, il, 
im, ir (when prefixed to a verb), in, as mduce ; (when 
prefixed to an adjective), not, as mvidious; inter, be- 
tween, as intervene ; intra, within, as introduce ; ob, oc, 
of, op, for, in the way of, as ojipose, offend ; per, 
through, as ^rmeate ; post, after, as postscript ; pre, 
before, as precede ; preter, beyond, as preternatural ; 
pro, for, forward, project, ^r^vide; re, back, again, 
remit, return ; retro, backwards, as retrograde ; se, aside, 
as secede ; sine, without, as sinecure ; sub, sue, suf sug, 
sup, sus, under, after, as succeed, s^Jaltern, suffice, sug- 
gest, support, suspect; super, above, as supersede; 
trans, beyond, as transcend ; ultra, beyond, as ultra- 
montane. The following terminations are derived from 
the Latin or French : able, ible, cle, He, ial, al, ian, an, ant, 
ent, fy, lar, ity, or, ose, ous, sion, tion, tive, tude, ture. 
But the Latin has not merely furnished our intel- 
lectual and philosophical terms ; it has thoroughly pen- 
etrated the structure of our tongue, and has assimilated 
itself to its genius and character, so that if the skeleton 
is Gothic, the texture is Romance and Latin. It has 
contributed essentially to the affluence of our speech in 
a great diversity of ways ; to the dialect of busy, active 
life, of daily intercourse, to the vocabulary of the mer- 
chant, of the banker, and the mechanic, as well as to the 
stately and elaborate diction of the historian or the phi- 
losopher. Observe the vocabulary of the man of busi- 
ness, and see how large a proportion of it is drawn from 
the Latin : account, balance, bank, banker, bankrupt, bill, 
cancel, calculate, capital, claim, clerk, count, compute, 
credit, currency, debt, debit, debtor, deficit, discount, 



124 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

clue, entry, finance, fiscal, ink, invoice, interest, insure, 
insurance^ liquidate, money, negotiate, note, pay, par, 
per cent., policy, premium, profit, secicrity, sum, 
specie. 

The pre-eminently monosyllabic character of English 
is commonly attributed to the existence of the same 
feature in Anglo-Saxon, together with its method of in- 
flection by letter change, and not by the addition of a 
formative element, d or ed. A more diligent examina- 
tion, however, will convince us that our monosyllables 
are, to a considerable extent, due to the Latin, and that 
they are produced b # y the agency of sound decay, the 
consequent compression of syllables, rejection of medial 
consonants, arid dropping of inflections. The following 
list of monosyllabic words derived from Latin, or from 
Latin through the French, some of which are designa- 
tions of familiar objects and ordinary appliances, shows 
how largely the Latin has contributed to the practical 
vocabulary of our language, as well as to its intellectual 
wealth : act, air, aunt, apt, art, arm, age, aim, hank, 
halm, bench, heat, hox (tree), hill, hull, howl, hrief, cant, 
care, cure, cat, cave, clause, cell, cent, chest, crest, crisp, 
clock, chief, camp, carp, chart, chaste, cheese, cook, chance, 
car, course, clear, clerk, claim, count, cede, cease, chain, 
corpse, crown, close, cube, code, crate, case, crude, disk, 
dish, desk, deck, duct, duke, debt, douht, due, date, dame, 
dire, edge, err, face, fact, feat, fig, feign, fame, fan, 
fate, fount, front, fail, fraud, form, fort, fruit, frail, 
fume, fiame, fuse, fork, firm,, few, grade, grain, grave, 
grand, gem, globe, grace, hour, ink, inch, isle, ire, join, 
joke, joy, joint, just, judge, lake, lamp, lance, land, 
large, lapse, line, lure, light, league, mass (missa), mass 
(massa), mere, merse, merge, mint, mule, monk, mile, 



THE VOCABULARY OE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 125 

muse, mob, move, new, neck, noun, oil, ounce, pay, pass, 
pace, pan, paint, pain, point, punch, par, peer, pear, 
peach, pen, pitch, plume, place, please, poor, plaint, 
peace, price, preach, prey, j^cty, post, parch, part, 
parse, pine (tree), porch, plain, plane, pest, press, print, 
prime, proof, prove, port, plank, plant, pall, pope, 
prone, prose, prude, pound, pure, pole, queer, quaint, 
quart, quest, rage, round, rein, rude, rare, ra/w, ruin, 
rose (noun, not the preterite tense of rise), rule, sack, 
seal, sign, sense, seat, siege, site, spend, state, stain, sting, 
stray, strict, string, sound, scarce, screen, search, sconce, 
scorch, sire, spy, sir, sure, sock, suave, soil, safe, surge, 
serve, serf sole, stem, strange, scourge, style, sage, sccde, 
scan, spade, sum, spice, scribe, spoil, square, star, team, 
tend, tempt, test, tin, thin, tile, toast, tract, trait, tribe, 
trite, use, urn, vast, vale, vile, vein, vain, vent, verge, 
verse, vest, vine, vice, wade, waste, wine, yoke. 

The French Element in English. 

A great number of French words were introduced by 
the Conquest. To the Norman-French we are indebted 
for many of the terms relating to feudalism, to war, the 
church, the law, and the chase. 

First. Aid, arms, armour, assault,- banner, baron, 
buckler, captain, chivalry, challenge, fealty, fief, gallant, 
homage, lance, mail, march, soldier, tallage, truncheon, 
tournament, vassal. 

Second. Altar, bible, ceremony, devotion, friar, hom- 
ily, idolatry, interdict, penance, prayer, relic, religion, 
sermon, scandal, sacrifice, tonsure. 

Third. Assize, attorney, case, chancellor, court, dower, 
damages, estate, fee, felony, fine, judge, jury, mulct, 
parliament, plaintiff, plea, plead, statute, sue, tax, ward. 



126 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Fourth. Bay, brace, chase, couple, copse, course, 
covert, falcon, forest, leash, leveret, mews, quarry, rey- 
nard, rabbit, tiercet, venison. 

From the Norman-French period descended a great 
number of terms expressive of malignant passion and 
hatred. The bitterness and virulence aroused by for- 
eign sway, the reciprocal hatred and distrust gen- 
erated by the Conquest, are strikingly reflected in the 
speech of this era. Rascal, villain, ribald, ribaldry, 
descend to us from those days of mutual animosity and 
disparagement. "Almost all the sinister and ill-favoured 
words in the English language at the time of Shakspere 
owe their origin to this unhappy period." 

The predominance of the French as the social lan- 
guage of Europe, as the language of fashion, of diplo- 
macy, and etiquette, has from time to time caused the 
adoption of many French words, some of which have 
been completely naturalized, while others reveal their 
origin. 

From the French our tongue has acquired much of 
its elegance and precision, many of its characteristic 
graces, and its faculty of indicating things naturally 
offensive or repugnant, whose direct mention would not 
comport with perfect delicacy, either of manner or ex- 
pression. The Anglo-Saxon, notwithstanding its vigour 
and plasticity, lacked polish and refinement ; its terms 
were direct, energetic, but often coarse and inelegant. 
This defect, certainly a serious one, the Latin and its 
French descendant have to a great degree remedied, 
and our accessions in this respect are among the most 
valuable contributions to the wealth of our language. 

French words : — Aide-de-camp, accoucheur, accouche- 
ment, attache, au fait, belle, bivouac, belles-lettres, 



THE YOCABULAKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 127 

billet-doux, badinage, blase, bon mot, bouquet, brochure, 
bonhomie, blonde, brusque, busk, coif, coup, debut, 
debris, dejeuner, depot, eclat, elite, ensemble, ennui, 
etiquette, entremets, fagade, foible, fricassee, gout, 
interne, omelet, naive, naivete, penchant, nonchalance, 
outre, passe, persiflage, personnel, precis, prestige, pro- 
gramme, protege, rapport, redaction, renaissance, re- 
cherche, seance, soiree, trousseau.* 

The vocabulary of French contains a number of 
words, Teutonic in origin, which were introduced by 
the Franks, a German tribe, and afterwards Romanized 
more or less to adapt them to the pronunciation of the 
Roman inhabitants of Gaul. From France they passed 
over to England, and have thus been perpetuated in the 
vocabulary of our tongue. Such words are ambassador ', 
attack^ attire, balcony, belfry, bivouac, chamberlain, 
choice, defile, enamel, eschew, guide, guile, guise, haunt, 
herald, massacre, pocket, quiver, reward, ring, rob, 
seize, slate, towel, wage, ward. 

* Morris's " English Accidence." 



CHAPTEK XV. 

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (continued). 



The Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic Element in 
English. 

The Anglo-Saxon constitutes the groundwork, the 
material substratum, of the English tongue. Nearly all 
the distinctive characteristics of English grammar are 
derived from this source. The following are Saxon : 
First. The definite article, the, and the indefinite, an, a ; 
all pronouns, personal, relative, demonstrative, etc., and 
the numerals. Second. All auxiliary and defective 
verbs. Third. Nearly all the prepositions, and the con- 
junctions. Fourth. Nouns forming their plurals by 
change of vowel, as man, men, etc. Fifth. Verbs form- 
ing their past tense by change of vowel (irregular verbs, 
sing, sang, sung). Sixth. Adjectives forming their de- 
grees of comparison irregularly, good, had / in short, all 
those peculiarities of our grammar generally designated 
irregular, which is merely an arbitrary expression to in- 
dicate ancient Saxon forms and usages, and to distin- 
guish them from the later or regular formations. 

Second. 1. Grammatical inflections ; plural suffixes s 
and en. 2. Verbal inflections of past and present 
tenses of active and passive participles. 3. Suffixes 
denoting degrees of comparison. 

Third. 1. Numerous suffixes of nouns, as hood, ship, 
down, th, ness, ing, ling, Mng, ock. 2. Of adjectives, 



THE VOCABULARY OP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 129 

as ful, less, ly, en, ish, some, ward, y. 3. Of verbs, 
as en. 4. Many prefixes, as a,* al, he, * for, ful, on, 
over, out, tender. 5. The names of the three elements, 
earth, fire, water (air is Latin aer), and of their changes ; 
the names of the heavenly bodies, sun, moo?i r etc., except 
star (Latin sterula) ; of many of the divisions of time, as 
morning, evening, twilight, noon, night, day, sunrise, 
sunset : some of these are probably of Latin origin, as 
hour, hora. From the Saxon we have acquired the 
names of many of the most striking natural phenomena, 
heat, cold, light, frost, snow, hail, rain j also the names 
of the most prominent and attractive objects in external 
nature, as sea, land, hill, dale, ivood, stream. The 
Anglo-Saxon has also furnished lis with the designations 
of most of the seasons, summer, winter, spring, fall, 
{autumn is from the Latin auctumnus), with the names 
of the organs of the body, the modes of bodily action 
and posture, the most familiar animals, many of the 
words employed in the ordinary intercourse of life, 
many of the terms pertaining to traffic, commerce, to 
the market, the work-shop, the farm. Also, the words 
acquired in infancy, the terms spontaneously evoked by 
the child in its earliest efforts to give expression to its 
dawning thoughts, the constituent parts of saws, maxims, 
and proverbs, are chiefly Anglo-Saxon. The names of 
the dearest relations, father, mother, f sister, brother, 
husband, wife ; of the objects suggestive of the tenderest 
memories, the holiest affections, home, hearth, Jureside, 
child, kindred, friends, are inherited from the Saxon. 
The names of the simpler emotions of the mind, terms 

* a and be are sometimes Norse. 

f Grand father, grand mother, are half Saxon, half Romance , 
aunt, uncle, entirely Romance. 

6* 



130 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

of pleasantry, satire, indignation, invective, and anger, 
are principally of native growth. The designations of 
special modes of performing an action of specific proc- 
esses, are mainly Saxon, while the generic or abstract 
terms are to great extent Latin. Thus, move, the general 
term, is Latin, but the specific and varied methods of 
performing the action are indicated by words of Saxon 
origin : run, jump, ship, walk, etc.* 

The Anglo-Saxon was moulded and prepared for lit- 
erary application by scholars who wrote and spoke Latin, 
and w r ho regarded it as the standard of literary excel- 
lence ; its literature is in great measure translated or 
imitated from the Latin. It cannot be questioned that 
Latin exercised a powerful influence in determining the 
character of Saxon, essentially modifying both its vocab- 
ulary and syntax, and assimilating it more and more 
closely, in spirit and in structure, to the imperial 
tongue. A large proportion of the Anglo-Saxon vocab- 
ulary finds its cognate words in the Latin dictionary, 
and there can exist no reasonable doubt that it was 
decidedly Romanized in character. Again, the Teutonic 
languages, by whose gradual commingling on the soil 
of Britain the Anglo-Saxon was formed, were in- 
debted to the Latin, as were also the Keltic tongues. 
Roman conquest and colonization had made their im- 
pression upon the Teutonic dialects long before the 
Saxon invasions of Britain. In addition to its direct 
influence, the extent of which is not properly appreci- 
ated, the Latin has perceptibly affected nearly every 
language and dialect that has contributed to the forma- 
tion of our varied and copious speech ; it has imparted 

* Edinburgh Beview, 1839, 1859. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 131 

a tinge of its own colouring to nearly all the manifold 
tributaries, by whose commingling English has acquired 
its marvellous affluence, catholicity, and comprehensive- 
ness. The Roman image is reflected in them all. 

The Danish Element in the English Language. 

The Danish invasions and occupations of England 
extend from a. d. 787 to a. d. 1042, at which time the 
Saxon government was restored. It was principally the 
Anglo-Saxon dialects, and not so much the literary 
speech or language of Wessex, that were affected by 
Danish influence. It does not appear that the Danes 
made any effort to extend or to perpetuate their tongue 
in England. The Saxons and the Scandinavian races 
were closely related in language as well as by blood ; 
there was a Scandinavian element among the Saxon 
colonists of Britain, and it is highly probable that the 
speech of the two nations was mutually intelligible. 
The Saxon understood the Dane; the Dane, the Saxon. 
This opinion finds some confirmation in the w T ell-known 
story of King Alfred, who entered the Danish camp in 
the guise of a minstrel, and sang his songs and recited 
his poems in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. This at least 
indicates that the two languages possessed marked re- 
semblances. It w r as in the north of England that the 
Danish tongue made the deepest impression. North- 
nmbria longest withstood the advance of the victorious 
Normans. The northern counties were not included in 
the great survey made by the Conquerour in 1085, and 
in these regions the traces of Danish influence are most 
strongly marked and enduring. Many Danish words 
are preserved in the Northumbrian speech, and many of 
their characteristic peculiarities of grammatical structure 



132 HISTOKY OP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

(in which they differ essentially from the standard Eng- 
lish) are derived from the Scandinavian tongues. The 
Danish conquests and occupations seem to have affected 
the structure of the Anglo-Saxon more than the vocabu- 
lary. In the north and east of England the Saxon in- 
flections were seriously modified by Danish influence; 
their decay was accelerated, so that in the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries nearly all the older inflections of 
nouns, verbs, and adjectives had disappeared, while in 
the south of England the old forms survived until a 
much later period, and many of them are still in exist- 
ence. There are numerous traces of Scandinavian 
terms in the local nomenclature of England, in the Old 
English literature of the north of the island, as well as 
in the provincial dialects or patois of Northumbrian 

* Scandinavian words in the Northumbrian dialects : 
Barkle, to stick to, to adhere, to cover over. 
Brangle, to quarrel. 

Bunt, to take home, pack up, make into a bundle. 
Clatcli, a brood of chickens. 
Creel, a frame to wind yarn upon, English, reel. 
Clem, to starve ; "I'm almost clemmed," i. e., starved. 
Crib, a rack. 

Faddle, nonsense, trifling. 
Flit, to move from place to place. 
Gain, gainer, a cross cut. 
Gaichy, a clownish simpleton. 

Kick, fashion, mode ; "a new kick," i. e., fashion ; Dan. s-kik. 
Lam, to beat soundly, to chastise. 
Mood, satiated. 
Rostle, to ripen. 

Scar, a steep, bare rock (Walter Scott, Lochinvar). 
Blunt, to be idle. 
Whack, a heavy blow. 
Whip off, to go off quickly. 
Yark, to strike hard. — Schneider. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 133 

Local names derived from Danish : the termination 
Jy — town, Whitby, Grimsby, liugby / Sy-law, a town 
law. The ending son, in names of persons, is also 
Danish, as Hobson, Johnson, Nelson y the endings gill 
and Jcirk, wOrmesgill, Ormeskirk. 

Words derived from Danish ox Scandinavian : * 

* Scandinavian peculiarities in the grammar of the Northumbrian 
dialects. — According to the census of 1861, the population of Eng- 
land was 18,954,444, of which Northumbria contained 5,580,834. 
It embraces more than one-fourth of the territory and the population 
of England, over which the influence of the Scandinavian settlers 
is still distinctly traceable. The Northumbrian dialects, though 
differing as to the number of words, have a grammatical system 
which is common to them all, though it departs in some respects 
from the grammar of written English. Perhaps their most remark- 
able characteristic is the definite article, or more properly the de- 
monstrative pronoun t, which is an abbreviation of the old Norse 
neuter demonstrative hit. This is not an elision of the he from the 
article the (which is of old Frisic origin), as may be seen from the 
fact that all the Bonapartist versions * of Solomon's Song, second 
chapter, first verse, uniformly agree throughout England, where 
they abbreviate at all, by making the into tK by eliding the final e. 
We quote from the Westmoreland version (from the centre of 
Northumbria), which is well executed and idiomatic. We select as 
a fair specimen the second chapter, first verse, of Solomon's Song, 
which in the authorized version reads as follows : " I am the rose 
of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys." In the Westmoreland ver- 
sion it reads thus : " I's t' roaz o' Sharon, and t' lilly o' t' valleys." 
The districts in which the abbreviated article prevails are the coun- 
ties of Central and South Durham, all Yorkshire, and nearly all 
Lancashire. The next characteristic is not so widely extended, be- 
ing confined to about one-third of Northumbria. This is the substi- 
tution of at for the relative that. In the authorized version, Solo- 
mon's Song, second chapter, fourteenth verse, we read : " That art 
in the clefts of the rocks ; " in the Westmoreland it is : " At's i' t 



* Prince Lucien Bonaparte paid much attention to the study of the Northern 
English dialects, into which he caused the second chapter of Solomon's Song to 
be translated. 



134 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Abroad, aslant, athwart, bang, basic, bellow, bole (of a 
plant), blunt, booty, bound (for a journey), brag, brink, 
bull, bush, cake, call, east, clip, clumsy, cross, crook, 
cripple, cuff, curl, cut, dairy, dash, daze, dazzle, die, 
droop, dub, dull, fellow, fleer* (to deceive, Shakspere, 
Julius Caesar), flit, fond, fool, fro, froth, gable, gait, 
grovel, glow, hale (to drag, Acts of the Apostles, eighth 
chapter, third verse), hit, hut, hustings, irk, keg, kid, 
kindle, leap (year), low, loft, lurk, niggard, mump, 
mumble, muck, odd, puck (goblin), ransack, root, scald 
(poet), scare, scold, skull, scull, scant, skill, scrub, skulk, 
sky, sly, screw, sleeve, sledge, sled, sleek, screech, shriek, 
sleight, sprout, stagger, stag, stack, stifle, tarn (a lake), 
trust, thrive, thrum, unruly, ugly, uproar, window, 
windlass* 



grikes o' t' crags." The aphaeresis does not properly belong before 
the at, as it is a pure Scandinavian word. In the use of the verb to 
be, the Northumbrian follows the Scandinavian. In the third per- 
son plural, present tense, they use the singular instead of the plural 
form, e. g., Horses is dearer than cows is. They inflect, I is, thou 
is, et cet., adhering to the Scandinavian rule. Another peculiarity 
is the use of i for in ; this is pure Scandinavian, being still used in 
Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish. From these few citations, we may 
see the extent to which the Danish has penetrated the speech of 
North umbria, as illustrated by five of the most common words in 
English, the representatives of the, that, in, art, and am. Their 
nouns have bat one case, having dispensed with the possessive in- 
flection ; for instance, they say, my brother hat, instead of my 
brother's hat. Their syntactical structure is characterized by ex- 
treme brevity and simplicity, sometimes condensing into one word 
an idea which requires for its proper expression in English two or 
three. Thus, in Solomon's Song, " I am the," is expressed Fst. The 
adjectives are distinguished by double forms, and by the Scandina- 
vian superlative form st instead of est. — From " Transactions of the 
London Philological Society." 

* The third person plural of the verb to be, are, is Danish. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 135 

To the Greek language, the English is indebted for 
most of the nomenclature of the physical sciences, a great 
proportion of the vocabulary of theology, philosophy, 
and of the terms employed in all arts and sciences, as 
well as a number of familiar terms. The Greek has also 
indirectly affected the English through the medium of 
the northern tongues, whose character it sensibly modi- 
fied in the earliest ages. By its wonderful plasticity and 
faculty of combination, the Greek supplies appropriate 
designations for many of the inventions, discoveries, and 
improvements in art and science : e. g., barometer, ther- 
mometer, stereoscope, photograph, telescope, etc. 

Many terms pertaining to the vocabulary of philoso- 
phy, science, metaphysics, logic, have lost their purely 
technical import, and have passed into the language of 
literature and the speech of every-day life : corollary, 
element, demonstrative, antipodal, atom, genus, inference, 
mean between extremes, diametrically opposite, positive, 
negative, inverse ratio, phenomenon, idea, qualitative, 
quantitative, species, zenith, and many others which oc- 
cur in the ordinary conversation of all intelligent persons. 

Words Derived from Miscellaneous Sources. 

In addition to the constituents of the vocabulary al- 
ready mentioned, our language has been enriched by the 
naturalization of numerous words from a variety of 
sources, many of which owe their introduction to the 
extension of commerce and the predominance of Eng- 
land as a commercial nation, as well as to the spirit of 
maritime enterprise which pre-eminently characterizes 
the English race. 

Hebrew : Abbot, amen, cabal, cherub, jubilee, phari- 
saical, Sabbath, seraph, Shibboleth. 



136 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Arabic: Admiral, alchemy, alkali, alcohol, alcove, 
alembic, almanac, amulet, arsenal, artichoke, assassin, 
atlas, azure, bazaar, caliph, chemistry, cotton, cipher, 
dragoman, elixir, felucca, gazelle, giraffe, popinjay, 
shrub, sofa, syrup, sherbet, talisman, tariff, tamarind, 
zenith, zero. Arabian culture and science exercised a 
powerful influence upon the literature of the Middle 
Ages. Many of the words named in the text have come 
into English through one of the Romance dialects: 
admiral, artichoke, assassin, popinjay. 

Persian: Caravan, chess, dervish, emerald, indigo, 
lac, lilac, orange, pasha, sash, shawl, turban, tafferty. 

Hindu: Calico, chintz, dimity, jungle, boot, muslin, 
nabob, pagoda, palanquin, paunch, pundit, rajah, rice, 
rupee, rum, sugar, todcly. 

Malay : Bantam, gamboge, orang outang, rattan, sago, 
verandah, tatoo and taboo (Polynesian), gingham (Java). 

Chinese: Caddy, nankeen, satin, tea, mandarin. 

Turkish: Caftan, chouse, divan, janissary, odalisk, 
saloop, scimitar. 

American: Canoe, cocoa, hammock, maize, potato, 
squaw, tobacco, tomahawk, wigwam, yam. 

Italian: Balustrade, bandit, brave, bust, canto, car- 
nival, charlatan, domino, ditto, dilettante, folio, gazette, 
grotto, harlequin, motto, portico, stanza, stiletto, stucco, 
studio, tenor, umbrella, vista, volcano. 

Spanish: Alligator, armada, cargo, cigar, desperado, 
don. embargo, flotilla, gala, mosquito, punctilio, tor- 
nado. 

Portuguese: Caste, commodore, fetishism, palaver, 
porcelain. 

Dutch: Block, boom, cruise, loiter, ogle, ravel, ruffle, 
scamper, schooner, sloop, stiver, yacht. 



THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 137 

German : Landgrave, landgravine, loafer, waltz, co- 
balt, nickel, quartz, feldspar, zinc." 

The vocabulary of the English language contains about 
one hundred and four thousand words. This does not 
include many provincial forms and local usages which 
are currently employed. The English is formed by 
the gradual blending of a greater diversity of languages 
and dialects than has ever entered into the formation of 
any other speech. Its main constituents are the Ro- 
mance and the Teutonic, but it has appropriated and 
assimilated materials from nearly all the languages of 
the globe. This, while it is the cause of its comprehen- 
siveness, versatility, and far-reaching adaptation, affords 
also the satisfactory explication of its complexity, 
its anomalous orthoepy, its discrepant orthography, 
its seeming transgressions of grammatical prescription. 
They constitute part of the exuberant wealth of our 
tongue ; they have resulted from the peculiar historical 
conditions under which it was developed and matured. 
The kindred languages of Europe were founded either 
upon the Lingua Rustica or popular Latin as their basis, 
or upon a Teutonic or Scandinavian groundwork. But 
it is the especial glory of the English tongue to have 
blended the graces and the energy of the two most pow- 
erful languages of the Aryan family. It is in English, 
and in English only, that all the phonetic elements, the 
diverse and varied forms of the Aryan family have con- 
verged. After many centuries of separation, many 
strange wanderings in foreign lands, upon the soil of 
Angleland the long severed linguistic branches are 
peacefully reunited, enriched with the wisdom and the 

* Morris's "English Accidence." 



138 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

experience acquired by many painful vicissitudes, many 
diverse fortunes, since they parted at the base of their 
mountain homes and started out upon their marvellous 
career. 

The greatest number of words in the vocabulary of 
the English language is derived from Romance and 
classical sources. This may at first sight appear contra- 
dictory and inconsistent, as the majority of persons, both 
in speaking and in writing, employ a greater number of 
Saxon than of Romance words ; but it is the character 
of the objects denoted by these words, the necessity for 
their constant recurrence, and not their actual predom- 
inance, that give them a numerical superiority. Again: 
the conjunctions, the indispensable parts of a sentence, 
" its bolts and pins," are nearly all Saxon, so that it is 
almost impossible to compose the simplest sentence 
without employing the Saxon element. 

But the greater proportion of the grace and refine- 
ment of our tongue, and consequently much of its supe- 
rior adaptation to all the loftier purposes of literature, 
are attributable to its Latin and Romance constituents. 
If the Romance element were eliminated from, our 
vocabulary, we should have a speech vigourous and 
energetic, but devoid of that delicacy of expression and 
rhvthmical charm which so adorn the commonest utter- 
ances as well as the grandest climaxes of the orator, or 
the intricate details of the historian. 

By its blending of two languages, English is enriched 
with a great variety of synonyms; we may, in fact, be 
said to have two languages in one; and this -bilingual 
system has formed a distinctive feature of our tongue in 
all stages of its history, from the time that it was 
moulded into harmonious form by the delicate touch of 






THE VOCABULAKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 139 

Chaucer's master hand. It is turned to good account by 
the translators of the Holy Scriptures, and much of the 
melodious rhythm that characterizes the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer of the Anglican Church must be attributed 
to the judicious employment of Saxon and Romance 
synonyms. 



CIIAPTEE XVI. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM CHAUCER TO CAXTON. 

A. D. 1400-1474. 

In the preceding chapters we indicated the manifold 
sources from which the constituents of our rich and 
varied vocabulary are derived. We must now retrace 
our steps, and resume our history at the period at which 
we for a time left it, the age of Chaucer, Gower, and 
Wycliffe. The era which was adorned by the genius of 
these illustrious names did not realize the bright prom- 
ises to which it had pointed so auspiciously. When the 
political and religious distractions of the fourteenth cen- 
tury had subsided, the intellectual vigour and energy that 
characterized the age were succeeded by a long period of 
inactivity and depression. The original and creative 
power of the English mind seems to have disappeared, 
and much of the literature of this century consists of 
mere translations or imitations of older models. 

The names of seventy poets have descended to us 
from this dreary period, of whom the most deserving of 
commemoration are Ocleve, James I. of Scotland, and 
Lydgate. All of these acknowledge Chaucer as their 
master and model in the poetic art. 

The number of prose writers is very limited, and the 
development of a pure English prose style was reserved 
until after the introduction of printing should begin to 



FKOM CHAUCER TO CAXTON. 141 

exercise a decided influence upon tlie language. The 
prose writers of this period are principally theological. 
Bishop Pecoke, whose "Repressor" appeared in 1450, 
was the purest of these. His grammar is essentially the 
same as that of Wyeliffe, with some tendency to greater 
simplification of structure, and a perceptible advance in 
style and construction. But in the main, the language 
seems to have retrograded, rather than to have advanced, 
between the deatli of Chaucer and the establishment of 
printing. The fierce and sanguinary Wars of the Roses, 
which extended over more than a quarter of the century 
— 1455-1486 — the convulsions and dissensions which 
disorganized the constitution of society, exerted for a 
time a most baneful influence upon the character of the 
tongue. Sympathizing with the vicissitudes of those 
who spoke it, and deprived of the conservative power of 
literary culture, it began to lose the coherence and the 
uniformity it had acquired under the skillful guidance of 
Chaucer, and manifested a marked tendency to disinte- 
gration, or resolution into its dialectic forms. But, not- 
withstanding the disastrous results that were temporarily 
produced by the protracted Wars of the Roses, their 
ultimate effects upon the fortunes and the constitution 
of the language were in many regards salutary and 
beneficial. The marching to and fro, throughout all 
portions of the kingdom, of vast bodies of men, the 
commingling of classes and dialects hitherto separate 
and isolated, the general intercommunication between 
sections of the island hitherto almost as unknown to 
their respective inhabitants as foreign lands, all tended 
in the end to impress upon the language, as well as upon 
the nation, a uniformity which strikingly contrasted 
with the diversity and confusion that had previously 



142 KISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

prevailed. In addition to this, the partial extirpation of 
the Norman nobility,* the elevation of the Saxon bur- 
ghers in their stead, tended powerfully to efface the 
ancient distinction between the Norman lord and the 
Saxon vassal, which had its origin at the Conquest, to 
obliterate social distinctions, and thus efficaciously to 
promote uniformity of national character, as well as uni- 
formity of speech. Hence, we discover that during this 
era, nearly the last vestiges of our inflexional system dis- 
appeared ; local peculiarities, sectional diversities, gradu- 
ally melted away, and a "common dialect" was ac- 
knowledged by all writers. The French wars, the 
extension of commerce, the contact between England 
and foreign climes, the cultivation of the civil law, all 
augmented the wealth of the vocabulary. Stimulated 
by these and similar agencies, the vocabulary increased 
very rapidly, so rapidly, that it is commented upon by 
the authors of that time. The language had now at- 
tained a condition which adapted it to the mighty 
instrument now brought to bear upon it, and destined to 
wield a determining influence in shaping its fortunes 
and directing its career, f 

* During the Wars of the Roses, many of the Norman nobility 
perished on the scaffold, and many, expatriated, wandered in foreign 
lands, begging their bread in those very regions from which their 
ancestors had set out to the field of Hastings. 

f Changes in English between Chaucer and Caxton. A large class 
of Anglo Saxon compounds perished, such as, to out-come, to out-go, 
to in-come, to in-go. Their places have been supplied by Latin 
terms, as depart, enter ; to before-come, to anticipate. — Wood. 



■ 



CHAPTEE XVII. 

THE INFLUENCE OF PRINTING UPON THE ENGLISH LAN- 
GUAGE. 

The Wars of the Roses left the English language in a 
more uniform condition ; they greatly simplified its 
structure, and introduced many important changes in 
pronunciation, some of which are exhibited in a preced- 
ing chapter (Chapter XIV). But notwithstanding their 
beneficial results, they were attended by disadvantages 
also. The language was rendered more generally intel- 
ligible; local and dialectic peculiarities were in great 
measure effaced in the blending and interfusion of races, 
and in the thorough reconstruction of society. But while 
the language in its transmuted state was more widely 
intelligible than any previous tongue or dialect, it was 
thoroughly crude and unregulated. It had attained 
uniformity and simplicity, but it lacked harmony and 
proportion. During the progress of the fierce and san- 
guinary struggle, the art of printing, invented in 1440, 
was introduced into England (1474) by Caxton, who 
established his press in the almonry of Westminster 
Abbey. ( This at first acted as a disturbing element, and 
tended to augment the existing disorder, though in the 
end it essentially promoted orthoepical and orthograph- 
ical consistency, uniformity of speech, and elegance in 
literary composition. 



144 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Caxton was a man of scholarly attainments, but the 
workmen whom he brought with him from the Conti- 
nent were Dutchmen, who were versed merely in the 
mechanical part of their art, and not acquainted with 
the structure or the orthoepy of the English tongue. 
Hence the immense advantages of printing were for 
some time imperfectly appreciated in England, and it 
failed to acquire that artistic excellence which it attained 
in other lands soon after its introduction.* In the Con- 
tinental countries the printers were among the most 
accomplished scholars of the age, a fact which accounts 
for the perfection that the art there attained. The for- 
eign handicraftsmen whom Caxton had brought to Eng- 
land resorted to numerous arbitrary devices, the clipping 
or contracting of syllables, the extension of words ; in 
their ignorance of our orthoepical system, they failed to 
distinguish words resembling each other in sound but 
differing in meaning, such as eminent and imminent, 

* " The importance of the invention of printing, startling and 
mysterious as it seemed, was very imperfectly appreciated by con- 
temporary Europe. It was at first regarded only as an economical 
improvement, and in England it was slow in producing effects 
which were much more speedily realized on the Continent. In Eng- 
land for a whole generation its influence was scarcely perceptible in 
the increase of literary activity, and it gave no sudden impulse to 
the study of the ancient tongues, though the printing-offices of Ger- 
many and Italy, and less abundantly of France, were teeming with 
editions of the Greek and Latin classics, as well as of the works of 
Gothic and Romance writers, both new and old. The press of Cax- 
ton was in active operation from 1474 to 1490. In these sixteen 
years it gave to the world sixty-three editions, among which there is 
not the text of a single work of classic antiquity. An edition of 
Terence, published in 1497, was the first classical work published 
in England, It does not appear that Caxton's press issued a single 
original work by a contemporary English author, if we except his 
own continuations of older works published by him." — Marsh,Wood. 



THE IKPLUEKCE OF PRIKTIKG. 145 

president and precedent, ingenious and ingenious. 
Every printer seems to have been guided by his pho- 
netic appetencies, and the sanction of authority was 
thus impressed upon numerous anomalies and diver- 
sities of spelling. In addition, Caxton himself appears 
to have had no uniform standard, and it seems to have 
been his general practice to reduce the orthography of 
the authors that he printed to the usage of his own age, 
or rather to an arbitrary standard of his own devising. 
The early productions of the English press were, in 
great measure, translations from the French.* Caxton 
had spent many years in France, and his style is per- 
vaded by Gallicisms both in vocabulary and in structure, 
and the number of French words and idioms introduced 
by him was very considerable. This was another cause 
of confusion and discrepancy. 

I The ultimate effects of printing, however, were bene- 
ficial in the extreme, and there can be no doubt that it 
is the most potent mechanical agency which has affected 
the fortunes of our tongue. Like all inventions, in its 
earlier stages it was liable to perversion and misapplica- 
tion, but when its real character and importance were 
distinctly apprehended, it proved a most influential 
agent in dispelling the prevailing rudeness, in facilitat- 
ing elegance and harmony of style, and in promoting 
uniformity and regularity of speech. The number of 
books and of readers was multiplied, the various dialects 
became more and more assimilated to the southern, or 
the speech of the capital and of the southern counties of 

the kingdom. Authors were enabled to address a larger 

— . , — - — — 

* Most worthy of commemoration among the works printed by 
Caxton, are Malorye's "Morte D'Arthur," printed in 1485, and the 
works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. 

7 



146 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

reading public than before ; the dialect of books began 
gradually to extend its sway and to supplant local forms 
and provincial usages, except among the uneducated 
classes, to whom books were not accessible. 

Printing also promoted many changes which it did 
not directly originate. The decay of inflections, and the 
consequent adoption of a syntactical structure, logical, 
not formal, in character, in which the relations of words 
are indicated, not by their terminations, but by the order 
of collocation or arrangement, necessitated essentia] 
changes in the construction of sentences. "It became 
necessary to divide into short and separate propositions, 
sentences which would otherwise have become involved 
and obscure, when nearly all the cases had but one form, 
and when the various persons of the verb had become 
almost entirely undistinguishable from each other." The 
complicated, periodic style which is intelligible in an in- 
flected tongue, is impossible in an analytic language like 
the English, without obscuring the author's meaning, if 
not rendering it wholly unintelligible. Independent 
and subordinate sentences in English must necessarily 
have the same form, and hence the necessity in these 
and in similar cases for some artificial contrivance, some 
mechanical device, such &$ pauses, stops, etc., to indicate 
those changes in meaning, which, in an inflected tongue, 
are made sufficiently clear by the terminations. The 
comparative facility with which printing was read stim- 
ulated the tendency to supply artificial expedients, and 
this, in conjunction with the disposition to write as 
briefly as possible, to make the sentence a whole, to be 
apprehended by the mind at once, and not an assemblage 
of various words, to be grasped separately, required an 
additional use of marks to aid the eye and to separate 



THE IOTLUE^CE OF PEIKTIKG. 147 

the parts of 'sentences. Hence, from the new conditions 
resulting from the invention of printing, arose, among 
other beneficial effects, the art of punctuation, which 
has materially simplified our grammar, as well as 
affected our modes of thought and our styles of compo- 
sition. 



CHAPTEE XYIIL 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FEOM THE COMMENCEMENT OF 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE ACCESSION OF ELIZA- 
BETH. 1500-1558. 

Between the time of Caxton and the death of Henry 
YIIL, 1547, our language underwent considerable im- 
provement, in consequence of the introduction of print- 
ing and the more extended diffusion of knowledge. 
Many of its superfluous forms were cast off ; many of 
its useless particles and prolix constructions were aban- 
doned. The literary productions of that age manifest 
gradual progress and advancement; display greater 
brevity of expression, as well as compactness of construc- 
tion, and even occasional elegance. But this improve- 
ment, beneficial as its effects were, was only partial, and 
much remained to be accomplished before the language 
could be divested of its ancient rudeness, its redundant 
forms, and its cumbrous idioms. 

The most important philological and literary monu- 
ment of the first quarter of the sixteenth century is 
Lord Berners's translation of the " Chronicles of Frois- 
sart," the first volume of which appeared in 1523, the 
second in 1525. The translation is executed with re- 
markable accuracy, and conforms so closely to the Eng- 
lish idiom that it has the air of an original work. The 
orthography of the translation is irregular and confused, 



from 1500 to 1558. 149 

a defect which may be attributed to the foreign printers, 
who were ignorant of the orthoepy and orthography of 
the English tongue. 

Another literary production of the first half of this 
century, which is valuable in a philological as well as in 
an historical point of view, is the u Life of Richard III.," 
by Sir Thomas More, printed in 1543. The style of the 
work displays a more advanced phase of the language 
than Lord Berners's translation, or than any other secular 
prose of this period, and it is probably the first speci- 
men of good English prose, "pure and conspicuous, well 
chosen, without vulgarisms or pedantry." 

The most important production of this period, and 
the one which exerted a more decided influence upon 
English philology than any other native work between 
the ages of Chaucer and of Shakspere, is Tyndale's trans- 
lation of the New Testament, first published in 1526. 
The English of Tyndale contrasts strangely with that of 
his contemporaries. While their style is characterized 
by awkward periphrases, and is modelled upon the in- 
volved and complicated periods of the Latin, that of 
Tyndale is thoroughly English in spirit and in construc- 
tion, and represents a more advanced stage of the lan- 
guage than the secular prose of that age. 

The same purity, or at least the same freedom from 
awkward and incongruous Latinisms, may be discovered 
in the writings of Latimer and some of the other reform- 
ers, though their style is occasionally rude and uncouth 
in the extreme. 

It is in the admirable Liturgy of the Church of England 
that the impress of Cranmer's mind and heart is most 
perceptible, but the parity of his diction entitles him 
to exalted position among the writers of the Eeforma- 



150 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

tion, and to honourable commemoration in a history of 
the English tongue. 

The sermons of Lever are pervaded by the fiery 
vigour of Luther, and they have been turned to good 
account by a brilliant historian of our own age. 

Upon the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 
1453, the light of classical learning found its way to 
Italy$ whence it was disseminated throughout the differ- 
ent countries of Europe. Upon its introduction into 
England, it was at first cultivated in accordance with 
correct and rational methods, and was restricted to the 
legitimate intention of transferring to the English 
tongue the elegance and the spirit, and not the t for?ns, of 
the classic writers. Some of the most distinguished 
scholars were purists in sentiment, and Sir John Cheke, 
the illustrious Greek professor at Cambridge, formed a 
plan for the elimination from the vocabulary of all 
words not of Saxon origin. But these endeavours for 
the reformation of the language produced no perceptible 
results, and the first decided effects of the study of 
classical learning, in England were similar to those that 
immediately followed the introduction of printing — 
additional confusion, discordance, and diversity. The 
cultivation of the ancient literature was speedily carried 
beyond its proper sphere. The votaries of classic learn- 
ing, not content with transferring the graces of antiquity 
to the native tongue, aspired also to engraft its forms 
and idioms upon its structure. The result was awk- 
wardness and incongruity unsurpassed. The language 
was oppressed with perverted imitations of classic graces, 
which sat strangely upon it; the free and natural English 
construction, simplified by the rejection of nearly all 
grammatical inflections, was distorted and burdened 



from 1500 to 1558. 151 

with the complicated syntax of the ancients; numerous 
terms, based upon Latin roots, ostentatious and pedantic 
in form as well as in meaning, were fabricated ; the 
language appeared stiff, ungainly, and ill at ease, in its 
novel and grotesque habiliments. 

These disastrous consequences of the abuses of clas- 
sical learning were stimulated by the immediate literary 
effects of the Reformation, which followed in the train 
of printing, and the revival of ancient literature. It is 
a prevalent, though a mistaken, impression, that the 
Reformation was beneficial to literature and sound learn- 
ing in the periods immediately succeeding.* On the 
contrary, it co-operated with the agencies already at work 
in marring the character and the constitution of the lan- 
guage. It provoked theological controversy, which was 
often conducted with acrimonious virulence; it narrowed 
the sphere of intellectual pursuits, and intensified the 
feelings of the combatants ; it concentrated the abilities 
of scholars upon the all-absorbing themes of polemical 
and religious discussion. In addition to these causes, 
the standard of theological education in England at the 
outbreak of the Reformation was extremely low, and 
there were consequently few scholars of sufficient attain- 
ments to conduct a controversy involving such momen- 
tous issues. Hence, a recourse to Continental scholars 
was necessary, and the want of native learning and con- 
troversial skill were supplied in great measure from for- 
eign sources. These, writing in Latin, introduced a 
specially Latinized phraseology, which naturally tended 
to augment the existing confusion. It was thus unpro- 



. * Southern Review, Oct., 1872. " Craik's English Language and 
Literature/' Vol. I. 



152 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

pitious to elegant literature ; it imported numbers of 
foreign terms and phrases, ancient and modern, and 
"rendered zeal and confidence much more effectual aids 
to authorship than art or the graces of art." * 

But the causes of confusion and disorganization are 
not yet fully specified. The Reformation in England 
induced a partial acquaintance with the treatises and the 
language of the German reformers ; it led to numerous 
translations from the French and Italian, as well as 
from the contemporaneous Latin. The wars between 
Charles V. and Francis I., of France, the relations which 
England sustained to those wars, invited the cultivation 
of foreign languages and literatures, and especially of the 
brilliant literature which had been developed under the 
auspicious skies of Italy.f Then followed the fashiona- 
ble affectation of Italian idioms and phrases, of Italian 
manners and graces, which prevailed so extensively 
during the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign a-nd during 
the reign of her father. Italian novels and romances 
were the favourite diversion of the fashionable and re- 
fined ; to understand Italian was an indispensable accom- 
plishment among courtiers and nobles. England became 
" Italianated " in speech and in morals. The extent to 
which these foreign influences were carried in the earlier 
part of Elizabeth's reign may be inferred from Roger 
Ascham's energetic and repeated protests, from many 
allusions in Lily's " Eitjphues" and from frequent refer- 
ences in the writings of contemporary or nearly con- 
temporary authors. The product that was evolved, by 
the combined action of so many diverse and powerful 

* Southern Beview, Oct., 1872. "Craik's English Language and 
Literature/' Vol. I. 
f Southern Beview, Oct. , 1872. 



feom 1500 to 1558. • 153 

agencies upon a language in a state of disintegration 
must have been a "strange medley" indeed. 

The " strange medley," too, was enriched by vast 
accessions of materials, gathered from under the four 
corners of the heavens ; the chivalric love of adventure, 
the development of commercial enterprise, the extension 
of geographical knowledge, the introduction of names 
for the articles, products, and commodities imported 
from many foreign climes, all tended to augment the 
vocabulary by the infusion of an enormous wealth of 
words. To cite one example: it is said "that the 
vocabulary of Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny 
has never been precisely ascertained." Such was the 
general condition of the English tongue at the time that 
Elizabeth ascended the throne. Its vocabulary was rich, 
copious, and varied, but heterogeneous and unascertained; 
the grammar was rude and unregulated, the syntactical 
order awkward, the pronunciation unsettled, its metrical 
principles and combinations undetermined. The ver- 
nacular tongue was held in low repute ; its future great- 
ness was unforeseen, and it was but little resorted to for 
literary purposes. The language, notwithstanding its 
amazing verbal wealth, was thoroughly disorganized, 
and imperatively demanded an entire reformation and 
reconstruction. It is true that during the latter years of 
Henry VTIL, Surrey and Wyatt introduced blank verse 
into English poetry, a form of versification derived from 
Italian models.* This new nnrhymed verse ripened 

* Perhaps from Cardinal Hippolito's translation of Virgil's iEneid, 
which was probably the earliest specimen of blank verse in the 
Italian language* It is supposed, however, by Prof. Henry Morley, 
that the translation was made by the poet Francesco Maria Molza, 
" who allowed the cardinal to take the credit of it." 



154 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

into perfection at a subsequent era, but it exerted at the 
first little influence upon the tongue; in fact, the blank 
verse of Surrey and Wyatt is scarcely more than prose. 

During this period, also, was introduced by Sir Thom- 
as Wyatt, the sonnet, invented in Italy by Vinea, in the 
reign of Henry III. of England, and immortalized by 
the genius of Petrarch. The English language is pecu- 
liarly unfavourable to the development of the special 
beauties of this graceful and difficult form of verse 
composition, but it has been cultivated with success 
by some of the greatest masters of English poetry, 
among whom may be mentioned Shakspere, Milton, and 
"Wordsworth. The popular element in poetry, repre- 
sented by the vigourous rhymes of Skelton, and the 
courtly element, represented by the Italian graces of 
Surrey and Wyatt, reappear in the luxuriant richness of 
the Shaksperian drama. 

Having traced the action of the multiform influences 
by which English was reduced to its lowly estate at the 
commencement of Elizabeth's reign, we must now con- 
sider that series of processes by which, in a compara- 
tively short period, the language underwent a perfect 
transmutation, and became the appropriate vehicle of 
Spenser's fairy song and of the marvellous revelations 
of Shakspere. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE FORMATION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 

Perhaps no language ever experienced more rapid 
improvement, and underwent a more thorough recon- 
struction, than English, during the first thirty years of 
Elizabeth's reign. Nobles, statesmen, knights, scholars^ 
even royalty, engaged assiduously in the labour of re- 
forming the native tongue. Every phase of literary 
effort was diligently explored ; the laws of style were 
carefully defined ; canons of versification were prescribed; 
the metrical capacities of the language were expanded ; 
its rhyming words were collected for the convenience 
of versifiers, and in every department of intellectual 
exertion the utmost zeal and energy were displayed for 
the re-formation of the vernacular tongue. Sir Philip 
Sidney, Puttenham, Webbe, Meres, Mulcaster, Levin, 
Sackville, Marlowe, contributed efficaciously to the 
improvement of the language, and tended essentially to 
stimulate the genius and the enterprise of native authors. 

Roger Ascham and Dr. Thomas Wilson are worthy 
of especial commemoration as the precursors of this 
school of linguistic reformers, and th§ former is entitled 
to a lofty position in the history of our tongue, as one 
of the founders of a cultivated English prose style. He 
was among the first to reject the use of foreign words 



156 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

and idioms, which had become so prevalent in the reign 
of Henry VIII. , so that the authors of that day, " using 
strange words, as Latin, Italian, and French, do make 
all things dark and hard." He laboured with praise- 
worthy diligence to inculcate the formation of a pure 
English prose style, and to rescue the language from 
the neglect and indifference with which it was regarded 
by his contemporaries. His zealous advocacy of the 
claims of the native tongue, and especially of its supe- 
rior adaptation to the purposes of prose composition, 
produced a marked improvement in the style of the 
period. So unfashionable had the literary application of 
English becomfe, that Ascham prefaces his " Toxophilus" 
(1544) with an apology for employing it, " doubting 
not that he should be blamed for it." 

Dr. Thomas Wilson, one of the oldest English philol- 
ogists, published, in 1551, " The Rule of Reason, con- 
taining the Art of Logic, set forth in English," and in 
1553, " The Art of Rhetoric, for all such as are studious 
of eloquence, set forth in English." The treatise of Wil- 
son powerfully aided the cause which Ascham had been 
advocating, the cultivation of English prose by scholars. 
It evinces excellent discrimination, and it tended to clear 
the language of foreign phrases and pedantic affectations. 

In 1565 appeared the first English tragedy (Gorboduc, 
or Ferrex and Porrex), in which the recently introduced 
blank verse of Surrey and Wyatt was employed. It 
was composed by Norton and Sackville, the latter of 
whom, in the Induction to his " Mirror for Magistrates," 
had proved himself the appropriate herald of Spenser's 
coming greatness.* 

* It was first acted in 1561-1562, though not published until 1565. 



THE FORMATION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 157 

Christopher Marlowe, our greatest dramatic poet 
before the time of Shakspere, contributed successfully 
to the establishing of blank verse as the recognized form 
of dramatic composition. Its progress, however, was 
very gradual, as is evident from the mixture in various 
proportions of rhyme, prose, and blank verse in the 
plays of Shakspere. 

In 1570 appeared the "Rhyming Dictionary" of Peter 
Levin, a work designed to facilitate the labours of versi- 
fiers. The preface contains some valuable observations 
upon the language of his time. 

In 1575 George Gascoigne published " Certain ISTotes 
of Instruction concerning the making of Yerse or Rime 
in English." " The Steel Glass," published in 1576 by 
the same author, is the first specimen in our language of 
an extended poem not dramatic, w r ritten in blank verse. 

In 1582 Richard Mulcaster wrote his "Elementary, 
which entreateth chiefly of the right writing of the 
English tongue." It is inferior to the "Schoolmaster" 
of Ascham, bat it contributed materially to the progress 
of English philology, as it embodies many acute and 
discriminating observations upon the language. 

In 1586 was published a " Discourse of English Poet- 
ry, together with the author's judgment concerning the 
Reformation of our English verse," by William Webbe. 
It is valuable on account of its delineations of English 
poets from Chaucer to his own day. The discourse w T as 
written in advocacy of the new system of hexameter 
verse, which had been introduced by Harvey in spite of 
violent opposition. 

The writings of Sir Philip Sidney were not given to 
the world until after his death (1586). His "Arcadia" 
was published in 1590, his "Sonnets" in 1591, and his 



158 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LAKGUAGE. 

" Apologie for Poetrie" and his "Defence of Poesy" in 
1595. The "Arcadia" was written in 1580-1581; the 
"Defence" and the "Apologie" in 1581. Sidney's 
prose style is the most graceful that the language, up to 
that time, had produced, though it displays an excess of 
art rather than an unconstrained freedom, and is more 
euphuistic than that of Lyly. "Yet, notwithstanding 
all the conceits into which it frequently runs, and also 
some want of animation and variety, Sidney's is a won- 
derful style, always flexible, harmonious, and luminous, 
and on fit occasions rising to great stateliness and splen- 
dour." Sir Philip advocates the capacities of the English 
language for the highest purposes of literary composi- 
tion, and it is a remarkable evidence of his linguistic 
discrimination that he was among the first of modern 
scholars to perceive the superiority of an uninflected 
grammatical structure and a logical syntax, over an in- 
flected structure, and a syntax based upon the formal 
relations of words. 

In 1586 appeared the first English Grammar, written 
by William Bullokar. 

In. 15 89 John Eider published the first English Dic- 
tionary of Latin and English, and English and Latin. 

By far the most valuable treatise in the province of 
criticism which appeared during the period of recon- 
struction was Puttenham's "Art of English Poesy," 
1589. It is replete with instructive information respect- 
ing the language of the time, and lays down elaborate 
canons for the guidance of poets. 

In 1598 Meres published his " Comparative Discourse 
of our English poets, with the Greek, Latin, and Italian 
poets," entitled "Palladis Tamia, or Wit's Treasury." 

Under the influence of these critical writers, the ver- 



THE FORMATION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 159 

nacular tongue rapidly advanced, approved standards of 
composition and models of style now existed, the lan- 
guage cast off much of its former rudeness, while it re- 
tained much of its former vigour and flexibility. Its 
roughness was tempered by artistic graces, but its bound- 
ing spirit was not repressed by rigid prescription, nor its 
rhythmical flow checked by the enervating procedures 
of a purely artificial era. 

But there were other influences, not yet enumerated, 
which tended to enrich the marvellous affluence of Eliz- 
abethan speech, and to complete the process of redinte- 
gration in the course of a single generation. We must 
first remember what has often been said of the learning 
and literary pretensions of the queen, and of the nobles 
and gentry of her court. Elizabeth herself was a scholar 
of decided merit, and her example was imitated by all 
who aspired to elegance of manner or admission into the 
courtly society of the age. The queen was acquainted 
with Greek, translated two of the orations of Isocrates, 
a play of Euripides, the "Hiero" of Zenophon, Sallust's 
," Jugurthine War," Horace's "Art of Poetry," Boethius' 
" Consolations of Philosophy," a long chorus from Sen- 
eca, one of Cicero's Epistles, and one of Seneca's. 
She also WTote many Latin letters, and original Eng- 
lish works in prose and poetry, and she spoke with 
.fluency the Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish lan- 
guages. " An impulse was thus communicated, a fashion 
was thus set, and dignity was conferred upon literature 
and scholarly pursuits. Admiration of the Greek and 
Latin, and the desire to rival or reproduce the triumphs 
of the French, and especially of" the Italian, inspired 
frequent imitations. These dispositions cherished an 
eager diligence of translation, not simply or mainly to 



160 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

transfer the thought and substance of ancient and mod- 
ern masterpieces to home use, but for the sake of domes- 
ticating acknowledged beauties, and of training the 
luxuriant redundance of the vernacular to the disciplined 
and- decorous shape of artistic composition. Roger 
Ascham, in his ' Schoolmaster,' commenced in 1563, and 
published in 1570, strenuously commends the practice of 
translation for the acquisition of style, and for the cor- 
rection of errors in the still unregulated tongue." Clas- 
sical learning had become a fashionable mania, Latin- 
isms were prevalent in the conversational dialect, the 
fashion of interlarding sentences with Latin phrases 
came generally into vogue, producing a sort of macaronic 
speech, which is ridiculed by Sidney with exquisite 
humour in the character of Rombus, and by Shakspere 
in the character of Holofernes. 

By the year 1625, every classic author had beeu ren- 
dered intelligible through the medium of translations. 
The great diversity of translations, the wide range of 
topics which they comprehended, called into requisition 
all the varied powers of the tongue. It was enriched 
by copious accessions of Latin and Greek words, and by 
the resuscitation of many native vocables which had be- 
come obsolete in literary composition, or were restricted 
to dialectic usage. In fact, the most remarkable feature 
of these translations is not so much their specially Latin- 
ized dialect, as the great number of native words that 
they revived. The translation of Erasmus's "Para- 
phrase of the New Testament," executed by Nicholas 
Udall, author of the first English comedy, at the sugges- 
tion of Queen Catherine Parr, is clear and vigourous in 
style, abounding in English idioms, expressive colloquial 
phrases, and terse Saxon terms. Philemon Holland, 



THE FORMATION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 161 

Master of the Coventry Grammar School, was an inde- 
fatigable translator of classic authors, and his versions, 
which fill five or six dense folios, contain a rich mine of 
native linguistic wealth. Not only this new literature, 
but new inventions and discoveries, new ideas and aspi- 
rations, all demanded new verbal forms for their ade- 
quate expression. These requisitions upon the energies 
of the speech were fully complied with, and in a short 
time the vocabulary of reflection became as rich as that 
of imagination. 

Another way in which the speech was simplified was 
by the amount of controversy elicited by the Reforma- 
tion — the extensive literature of attack and reply, of 
political dissertations and pamphlets. The issues in- 
volved in these discussions were of a popular character, 
and contributed to simplify the structure of the language, 
and to assign additional prominence to the Saxon ele- 
ment in its vocabulary. 

Thus, every phase of the language was re-fashioned 
and re-organized in the space of about thirty years. 
Under the judicious precepts of Ascham and Wilson, 
prose, a species of literature always subsequent in the 
order of development to poetry,* gradually assumed a 

* " There is a general law according to which, in all nations, met- 
rical literature has preceded prose. Almost from the first hour that 
Englishmen expressed their feelings in song, or sought play for 
their imagination in tales, they chose their vernacular for that pur- 
pose ; whereas, in those departments of literary exercise which the 
world had long recognized as the proper dominion of prose— the 
great business of record or of history in all its varieties, the noble 
work of speculation or philosophical thought on all subjects inter- 
esting to humanity, and to some extent, also, the work of social con- 
troversy and moral exhortation — Latin had all along been preferred 
to English. An English prose was indeed nobly disentangling itself. 



162 .HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

loftier and a purer tone. But much of the prose compo- 
sition of the Elizabethan age is coloured by a poetic 
glow, and it was not until a much later period that prose 
acquired its modern form and character. The canons of 
poetry had been diligently explored, the metrical capaci- 
ties of the tongue had been tested, the forms of versifi- 
cation had been thoroughly discussed, blank verse was 
slowly winning its way to favour, the necessities of 
translation had recovered much of the buried wealth of 
the language, and had tempered its ancient rudeness by 
naturalizing the decorous graces of Greek and Roman 
art. The great era of the English tongue was about to 
dawn. 

Any account of Elizabethan English would be neces- 
sarily imperfect without an explanation of one of its 
characteristic features — Euphuism. It is an important 
phenomenon in the history of the language, though its 



As was natural, it had disentangled itself in the form and for the 
purposes of pulpit eloquence. Allowing for the precedents of a 
Wycliffe, a Chaucer, in some of his works, a Sir Thomas" More, and 
the like, the first English prose style was that of the pulpit, after 
the Reformation. Then, in the Elizabethan age, towering above a 
host of chroniclers, pamphleteers, and polemical theologians, there 
had appeared a Sidney, a Hooker, a Raleigh, and a Bacon. After 
such men had appeared, and there had been exhibited in their writ- 
ings the union of wealth and depth of matter with beauty and even 
gorgeousness of form, there could no longerbe a definition of litera- 
ture in which English prose should not be coordinate with English 
poetry. And yet, so much had still to be done before genius of all 
kinds could sufficiently master the new element, and make it plastic 
for all purposes (some of those included which poetry had hitherto 
believed to be her own), that in the schemes of our ablest literary 
historians, it is common to count but one period of English prose 
prior to the age of Dryden and the Restoration." — Masson's Life of 
Milton, Vol. I. 



THE FORMATION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 163 

character and influence have been so often misconceived 
and misrepresented. Many hav^derived their impres- 
sions of euphuism from Sir Walter Scott's delineation of 
Sir Piercie Shaf ton in the " Monastery," which is not 
merely an exaggeration, but a ridiculous and unpardona- 
ble travesty. Euphuism was introduced into England 
from Italy during the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign, 
and brought to perfection in the hands of John Lyly, a 
dramatic poet of this era, in his two productions, u Eu- 
phues, the Anatomie of Wit," and "Euphues and his 
England." Lyly was merely a representative of the 
prevalent literary fashion, and he imparted to euphuism, 
when at its climax, a typical and polished form. Some 
of its distinctive peculiarities, together with its name, 
are to be traced to the influence of the Platonic philoso- 
phy in England during the reign of Henry YIIL, an in- 
fluence which came also from Italy. The skill of Queen 
Elizabeth in dexterous phrases, and her accomplishments 
as a linguist, favoured the growth of euphuism at her 
court. The frivolous character of James I. lowered the 
dignity, while it extended the sphere of literary affecta- 
tion. The fervour of political and religious enthusiasm 
imparted to the conceited and pedantic style a glow of 
life and passion, in the days of Charles I. and the Com- 
monwealth. Its influence upon the language of England 
continued during the rule of Cromwell, and much of the 
language of the Puritans was euphuism, inflamed with 
religious zeal, and acquiring a sombre hue from the 
gloomy fanaticism of the age. The success of Lyly's 
work was immense ; he introduced a new English, and 
elegant and courtly dames, nobles, cavaliers, and schol- 
ars were his -followers. The essential characteristics of 
euphuism were verbal antithesis, strange contrasts, a 



164 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

straining after effect, remote allusions, and incongruous 
combinations. In th%- ordinary conversation of society, 
it doubtless became an absurd jargon, but in the bands 
of Lyly, despite its characteristic faults, it attained an 
elegance and simplicity of form unknown in the prose 
literature of that era, and which strikingly foreshadow 
the graceful ease of the Addisonian age. In its purer 
types, as exhibited by Lyly, it was an essential simplifi- 
cation both of structure and vocabulary, an endeavour 
to inculcate the graces of style by practical illustration, a 
sort of " art teaching by example." Few of the writers 
of the Elizabethan period escape the fascination of the 
euphuistic style. Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspere all 
yield in a measure to its influence, and the style of Sid- 
ney is more euphuistic than that of Lyly. No sphere 
of literary effort was able to escape the contagion. It 
pervaded, in its extravagant forms, the discourses of 
Andrews, the poetry of Donne, and, at a later day, the 
style of Fuller. Our dramatic poetry, the most native 
portion of our literature, was least affected by its influ- 
ence. Its impress is visible until the era of the Restora- 
tion, when it was supplanted by the French models 
then coming into repute. 

Euphuism is not, however, a feature peculiar to the 
Elizabethan age, nor to any particular era of linguistic 
history; it is constantly reproducing itself in diverse 
forms and with varying degrees of virulence. The anti- 
thetical brilliance of Macaulay is merely " the euphuism 
of the elder day," and in the discourses of the modern 
sensational school of divines, we have a strange resusci- 
tation of the incongruities and fantasies of euphuism, 
without the redeeming excellencies which it attained 
under the culture of the graceful Lyly and his associates. 



CHAPTEE XX. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH.* 



From the contents of the preceding chapter, the stu- 
dent is enabled to understand the combination of influ- 
ences by whose action the English tongue underwent, in 
a comparatively short period, an entire re-formation, and 
acquired that richness, flexibility, and vigour which pre- 
eminently characterize the English of the 'Elizabethan 
era. 

Upon a superficial examination of Elizabethan Eng- 
lish, it appears to present this striking contrast to the 
English of modern times — that in the former any irreg- 
ularities whatever, either in the formation of w T ords or 
the combination of them into sentences, are allowable. 
In the first place, almost any part of speech can be sub- 
stituted for any other part of speech. An adverb can 
be used as a verb, "They askance their eyes;" as a 
noun, "The backward and abysm of time;" as an ad- 
jective, "A seldom pleasure." Any noun, adjective, or 
intransitive verb can be used as a transitive verb. You 
can "happy your friend," "malice your enemy," or 
"fall" an axe upon his neck. An adjective can be used 
as an adverb ; you can speak and act " easy," "free ;" or 
as a noun, and you can talk of "fair," instead of 

* This chapter is principally condensed from Abbott's " Grammar 
of Shakspere." 



166 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

" beauty," and a " pale," instead of a " paleness." Even 
the pronouns are subject to these metamorphoses. A 
"he" is used for a man, and a lady is described by a 
gentleman as " the fairest she he has yet beheld." * In 
the second place, we encounter every variety of apparent 
grammatical inaccuracy. He for him, him for he, spoke 
and took for spoken and taken ; plural nominatives with 
singular verbs, relatives omitted where they are now 
considered essential, unnecessary antecedents employed : 
shall for will, should for would, would for wish / to 
omitted after I ought / inserted after / durst ; double 
negatives, double comparatives and superlatives; "more 
braver," "most unkinclest cut;" such followed hy which, 
that by as, as used for as if, that for so that / some 
verbs used apparently w T ith two nominatives, and some 
without any nominative at all. In addition, many 
words, especially prepositions and the infinitives of verbs, 
are used in a sense different from the modern; thus, 
"received of the most pious Edward," does not mean 
"from Edward," but "by Edward,". and when Shak- 
spere says that " the rich will not every hour survey his 
treasure for blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure," 
he does not mean "for the sake of," but "for fear of" 
blunting pleasure. 

Upon a n 3re diligent inspection, these seemingly 
hopeless discrepancies and anomalies can be reduced to 
several distinct heads. 

^The Elizabethan was a period of transition in the 
history of the English tongue. The enormous influx of 
new discoveries and new ideas, resulting from the condi- 

* This usage continued until the eighteenth century. I have 
found an example in Steele (" Spectator," 492), "as agreeably as any 
she in England." 






ELIZABETHAN" ENGLISH. 167 

tions enumerated in the preceding chapters, demanded 
for their adequate expression numbers of new words, 
especially abstract terms. Then the revival of classical 
literature, the prevalence of translations from the ancient 
authors, suggested Latin and Greek words (but chiefly 
Latin) as their proper equivalents. The language thus 
received copious accessions of Latin and Greek vocables. 
The involved and complicated periods of the ancients 
formed the models of Elizabethan authors. In the en- 
deavour to assimilate English to the Latin syntax, the 
constructive power of the latter was strained to the full- 
est tension. But the influence of the classical languages 
acted principally upon single words and upon the 
rhythm of the sentence. J The syntax was mostly Eng- 
lish, both in its origin and its development, and several 
constructions that are considered anomalous (double 
negative, double comparative) have had from the earli- 
est period an independent existence in English, and 
many of the anomalies specified above have their origin 
in some peculiarities of early English, modified by the 
transitional Elizabethan period. Above all, it must 
be borne in mind that early English was far richer in 
inflections than Elizabethan English. So far as English 
inflections are concerned, the Elizabethan period tended 
rather to destroy than to preserve. Naturally, there- 
fore, while inflections were falling into disuse, various 
tentative experiments were resorted to ; some inflections 
were rejected that have since been reinstated, and others 
were retained that have since been discarded. In other 
instances in which inflections had been preserved, their 
original significance had disappeared, and in other cases 
the memory of inflections that had been lost still affected 
the manner of expression. 



168 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

I. Inflections discarded but their power retained. — 
Hence, " spoke" for " spoken, 5 ' "rid" for "ridden," 
" you ought not walk " for " you ought not walkm " (the 
old infinitive). The new infinitive " to walk," used in 
its new meaning, and also sometimes retaining its old 
gerundive signification. "To glad" (transitive), "to 
mad" (transitive), for "to gladdm," "to madden." The 
adverbial e being discarded, an adjective appears to be 
used as an adverb : " He raged more fierce." 

II. Inflections retained with their old power. — The 
subjunctive inflection frequently used to express a con- 
dition : " Go not my horse," for " If my horse go not." 
Hence, as with the subjunctive appears to be used for as 
if, and for and if, hut (in the sense of except) for ex- 
cept if. The plural in en very rarely. The plural in es 
or s far more commonly. His used as the old genitive 
of he for of him. Me, him, etc., used to represent other 
cases besides the objective and the modern dative : " I 
am appointed him to murder you." 

III. Inflections retained, but their power diminished 
or lost.— Thus "he" for "him," "him" for "he," "I" 
for "me," "me" for "I." In the same way the s, 
which was the sign of the possessive case, though fre- 
quently retained, had so far lost its meaning that it was 
sometimes (incorrectly) replaced by his and her. 

IY. Other anomalies may be explained by reference 
to the derivations of words and the idioms of early 
English. Hence can be explained, so followed by as, 
such followed by which, that followed by as, who fol- 
lowed by he, the which put for which, shall for will y 
should for would, and would for wish. 

These causes, however, do not sufficiently account for 
all the anomalies of Elizabethan English. There are 




ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 169 

several redundancies, and still more ellipses, which can 
only be explained as follows : 

V. Clearness was preferred to grammatical correctness, 
and brevity both to correctness and clearness. Hence, 
it was common to arrange words in the order in which 
they came into the mind, with but slight attention to 
syntactical order, and the result was an energetic and 
perfectly clear sentence, though an ungrammatical one ; 
as, " The prince that feeds great natures, they will sway 
him." As an example of brevity, "It costs more to get 
than to lose in a day." 

VI. One .great cause of the difference between Eliza- 
bethan and Yictorian English is, that the latter has 
introduced what may be called the division of labour. 
This may be illustrated by a few examples. The Eliza- 
bethan subjunctive could be used, optatively; or to 
express a condition or a consequence of a condition ; or 
to signify purpose, after " that." Now, all these differ- 
ent meanings are expressed by different auxiliaries : 
"would that," "should he come," "he would find," 
" that he may see/' and the subjunctive form has become 
almost obsolete. " To walk" is now either a noun, or it 
denotes purpose, "in order to walk." In Elizabethan 
English to walk might also denote " by walking," " as 
regards walking," "for walking." In like manner 
Shakspere could write "of vantage" for "from vantage 
ground," "of mine honour" for "on my honour," "of 
purpose" for "on purpose," " of 'the city's cost" for "at 
the city's cost," "did I never speak of all that time" for 
"during all that time." Similarly, "by" has lost many 
of its varied powers, which have been transferred to 
"near," "in accordance with," "by reason of," "owing 
to." " But " has also yielded some of its rights to " un- 

8 



170 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

less" and "except." In the last place, "that," in early- 
English <the only relative, had been supplanted before 
the Elizabethan era in many idioms by "who" and 
" which," but it still retained its meanings of " because," 
" inasmuch as," and " when ; " sometimes under the 
forms "for that" "in that;" sometimes without the 
prepositions. As a general rule, the tendency of the 
English language has been to divide the labour of expres- 
sion as far as possible, by diminishing the task imposed 
upon overburdened words, and by assigning special 
shades of meaning to terms which expressed but one 
general idea. There are exceptions to this rule, as " who" 
and " which," but such has been the general tendency. 

VII. The character of Elizabethan English is im- 
pressed upon its pronunciation, as well as upon its 
idioms and words. As a rule their pronunciation seems 
to have been more rapid than ours. The vowels were 
probably pronounced as in Latin, French, and German : 
The accent was fluctuating, owing to the contest between 
the native accentual tendencies of the speech, and the in- 
fluence of the Latin accentual system. This will account 
for the varying and unsettled pronunciation of many 
words, which are accented sometimes on the first, some- 
times on the last syllable. Hence we find ac'cess, and 
acce'ss, pre'cept and prece'pt, in'stinct and insti'nct, 
re'lapse and rela'pse, com'merce and comme'rce, ob'du- 
rate and ohdu'rate, con'trary and contra'ry, sepulchre 
and sepu'lchre, etc. The conflict was adjusted by a 
compromise. Some words retained the Latin accent, as 
respe'ct, rela'pse : others were appropriated by the Eng- 
lish, aspect, ac'cess. 

VIII. Words then used literally, are now used meta- 
phorically, and vice versa. The effect of this is most per- 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH. 171 

ceptible in the altered sense of prepositions. For instance, 
"by," meaning, originally, " near," lias supplanted 
"of " in the metaphorical sense of agency. With regard 
to Latin and Greek words it will generally be found that 
the Elizabethan writers use them in their literal or 
primitive sense : we use them metaphorically. This is 
evident from noticing the Latin words employed by the 
Translators of the Scriptures, by Shakspere, Bacon, Put- 
tenham. Observe the altered sense of the following 
words of Latin derivation,* occurring in the Authorized 
Version of the Scriptures, in Shakspere, and in Putten- 
ham : Censicre, to judge, simply, without regard to the 
character of the judgment : convenient, consistent : con- 
versation, acquaintance, association : denounce, to an- 
nounce: insolent, unusual: offend, to cause to stumble, 
to entrap : officious, full of kindness : palpable, that 
which can be felt materially : virtue, manhood. In the 
copious influx of Latin and Greek words into the 
vocabulary during this era, many were introduced to 
express ideas for which adequate provision had already 
been made in the existing vocabulary. These words, 
finding the ground they were designed to occupy al- 
ready appropriated, were compelled to assume either 
special shades of meaning, or to adopt metaphorical, in- 
stead of literal significations. On the other hand, some 
Latin and Greek words that were used to express tech- 
nicalities, have acquired a looser and more indefinite 
sense, as their original import has gradually faded away. 
Thus " influence " originally signified merely the sup- 
posed influence of the stars upon the fortunes of men ; 
its meaning is now essentially altered. A correspond- 
ing change has taken place also in the meanings of 
" pomp," " ovation," " decimate." 



172 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

The enumeration of the points of contrast between 
Elizabethan and Victorian English may seem to have 
been a mere list of anomalies and irregularities, and 
proofs of the inferiority of the former to the latter. But 
it should be remembered that the Elizabethan was a 
period of formation, of transition, and of experiment ; and 
that its experiments were not always successful. While 
we have gained much in precision, elegance, and deli- 
cacy of expression, since the days of Elizabeth, we have 
sacrificed much of the ancient melody, the bounding 
rhythm, the nervous energy of our elder writers. It 
may be safely assumed, however, that the gains have 
compensated for the losses.* 

* One of the most serious losses that our language has sustained, 
is the gradual decadence of the subjunctive inflection. Its judicious 
application constitutes one of the distinctive excellencies of our 
tongue, and it is employed with rare beauty and discrimination by 
our elder writers. It is one of those delicacies of expression for 
which the language furnishes no equivalent. 



CHAPTEE XXI. 

THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 1580-1625. 

The student is now able to understand that combina- 
tion of influences, by whose agency the tongue of Eng- 
land was transformed, redintegrated, and advanced to a 
degree of surpassing excellence in a comparatively brief 
period, so that to the unregulated, fluctuating speech 
which marked the early years of the Virgin Queen's 
reign, succeeded the fairy strains of Spenser, the verbal 
affluence of Shakspere, the stately periods of Hooker, 
the practical philosophy and far-reaching wisdom of 
Bacon's Essays. Lyly's " Euphues," 1579-1580, and 
Sidn ay's "Apology," 1580-1581, may be taken as the 
commencement of the Elizabethan era. Many of the 
noblest productions of this era belong, properly, not 
to the reign of Elizabeth, but to that of her successor, 
James L, to the seventeenth rather than to the sixteenth 
century. Still, the designation is a correct one: the 
excellence of the language was attained during her 
reign ; its capabilities were developed and matured 
during this period, and its wonderful improvement was 
the result of causes which had their origin at that date, 
although they may not have produced their most brilliant 
results until the succeeding century 

The Elizabethan era is not only the greatest in the 
history of the English language, but the greatest, per- 
haps, in the history of the world. Every phase of the 



174 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

language was called into action, all its latent energies 
were quickened, its manifold powers put forth all their 
strength. No department of literary effort failed to 
participate in the glorious awakening of the human 
mind. The Reformation and the Renaissance broke the 
thraldom of scholasticism, and led forth the intellect 
from the house of bondage. It was essentially an age of 
action, of enterprise, of lofty daring, and splendid 
achievement. The study of ancient literature, now pur- 
sued in conformity to rational methods, smoothed the 
ruggedness of our tongue, and adorned it with the 
graces of classic art. The process of dialectic regenera- 
tion contributed to the existing richness of the current 
speech, by drawing freely upon the ancient fountains 
of the language, and calling into requisition its varied 
and exuberant resources. Dialectic forms are used 
without reserve by the dramatists of the Elizabethan 
era, and it constitutes one of the great periods of 
dialectic regeneration in the history of the English 
tongue. The language and the literature of the Eliza- 
bethan era are characterized by boldness, originality, 
vigour of expression, and the absence of those 
conventional restraints with which the critical taste of 
later ages has in great measure restricted the ancient 
freedom of our tongue. It is the great era of creative 
power and of original conception, when authors, unen- 
cumbered with a profusion of learning, and unfettered 
by the rigid prescriptions of subsequent criticism, sur- 
rendered themselves to the guidance of their own im- 
pulses, wrote as they felt, regarding more the substance 
than the form and texture of their compositions. Art 
and nature were harmoniously blended, though nature 
predominated ; and genius, free from the enervating in- 






THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 175 



fluences of an Augustan age, soared into the very 
heavens in its unfettered flights. Every department of 
intellectual effort was strained to the fullest tension ; 
the drama, which attained its completed form about the 
middle of the sixteenth century, revealed to the unedu- 
cated classes the splendid creations of contemporary 
artists, and afforded them occasional glimpses of that 
incomparable literature, which was otherwise to them a 
book with seven seals. It thus tended to promote sim- 
plification of speech, and served as the connecting link 
between prose and verse. The process of transition may 
be traced in the plays of Shakspere, in which rhyme, 
prose, and blank verse are blended in varying proportions. 
In the hands of Spenser,* the spirit of Chaucer awoke 
from its dreary slumber, touched as by an enchanter's 
w r and. While Spenser cannot be ranked as the greatest 
of our poets, his poetry is the most musical in our lan- 
guage. So delicate and subtle is his perception of the 
connection between sound and sense, that one of the 
most accomplished philologists of the present age has 
cited his rhymes, in order to illustrate the action of the 
onamatopoetic or imitative principle in the develop- 
ment of speech.f His fairy strain rose "with no middle 

* The influence of Chaucer upon the English language and litera- 
ture of the latter half of the sixteenth century, appears to have been 
very decided, and is beginning to be investigated with the zeal and 
attention which its importance demands. Spenser's archaic diction 
is partly due to the influence of Chaucer ; there are well-defined 
traces of his influence in the plays of Shakspere, especially in 
" Troilus and Cressida ; " and there are numerous allusions to the 
great poet in the literature of that era, in Ben Jonson, Daniel, Dray- 
ton, etc. 

f Introduction to Wedge wood's " Etymological Dictionary," 1st 
edition. 



176 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

flight" into the poetic firmament; every word is a lucid 
crystallization of the thought, every sound a clear, ring- 
ing echo of the sense. The influence of Spenser's 
poetry, in refining and expanding the metrical forms 
and ' capabilities of our tongue, as well as his influence 
upon succeeding generations of poets, cannot be too 
highly estimated. Under his guidance, our poetry 
attained the full consciousness of its powers. England 
was now a land of song, and the most productive period 
of our poetical literature had fairly commenced. But 
the "olde order changeth, yielding place to new;" a 
greater than Spenser was soon to appear ; his conserva- 
tive disposition and his retention of archaic forms and 
dialectic peculiarities excited unfavourable criticism, 
even during the Elizabethan era. The poet of chivalry, 
veiled in allegorical drapery, was to be succeeded by the 
poet of nature ; and in our own time, the popular 
estimate of Spenser, like the popular estimate of Addi- 
son, is traditional, rather than critical. 

" What are commonly called the (minor poets of the 
Elizabethan age may be counted by hundredsjand few 
of them are altogether without merit. If they have 
nothing else, the least gifted of them have at least some- 
thing of the spirit of that balmy morn, some tones 
caught from their greater contemporaries, some echoes 
of the spirit of music that filled the universal air. For 
the most part the minor Elizabethan poetry is remarka- 
ble for ingenuity and elaboration, often carried to the 
length of quaintness, both in thought and expression ; 
but if there be more in it of art than of nature, the art 
is still that of a high school, and consists in something 
more than the mere disguising of prose in th^ dress of 
poetry. The writers are always in earnest with their 



THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 177 

nature or their art, and the poorest of them are always 
distinguished from mere prose by something more than 
the mere sound." 

J^-In the dramatic- productions of Shakspere, the speech 
of England reached the full meridian of its splendour. 
Though not so highly esteemed in his own day as his sen- 
sational but brilliant contemporaries, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, his influence upon the language of succeeding 
generations can scarcely be estimated ; he may be said 
to have created a new language, or, at least, to have 
created a language within a language. There is a Shak- 
sperian dialect almost as clearly defined as the sacred 
dialect, and next to those peculiar forms and consecrated 
idioms in which the oracles of God have revealed them- 
selves to the English-speaking world since the days of 
Wycliffe, none are so firmly engrafted upon our tongue, 
none have so thoroughly permeated its vocabulary and 
phraseology, as the inimitable combinations of Shak- 
spere. His verbal affluence surpasses that of every 
other writer; his vocabulary* is as comprehensive and 
varied as his conceptions of humanity; it calls into 
requisition all the resources of that marvellous speech 
whose luxuriant richness had been gathered from the 
four quarters of the earth, which had been moulded and 
ascertained by the painstaking labours of a race of writ- 
ers endowed with rare discrimination, and imbued with 
ardent zeal for the improvement and advancement of 
their mother tongue. 

In the " Ecclesiastical Polity" of Hooker, the language 
of theology attained its loftiest excellence. His style is 



* Shakspere employs fifteen thousand words, perhaps one-third 
of the vocabulary of English in that age. 

8* 



178 EISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Latinized, complicated, and sometimes obscure, but he 
is considered the first English prose writer, " that ex- 
hibits philosophical precision and uniformity in the use 
of words, and this is the peculiarity of his style which 
gives it its greatest philological value. This nicety of 
discrimination he extends even to particles." 

In the style of Bacon's " Essays," we have an example 
of the speech of the most highly educated persons, in the 
conversational discussion of practical philosophy, exhibit- 
ing the excellences of euphuism, without its character- 
istic weaknesses. The style of the " Essays" is fascinat- 
ing, though partaking somewhat of Elizabethan freedom 
and disregard of grammatical proprieties. 

The final settlement of the Reformed religion, in the 
reign of Elizabeth, led to the establishment of the Lit- 
urgy of the Anglican Church, which in its various forms 
was prepared during the reigns of Edward VI. and 
Elizabeth. This unsurpassed manual of devotion, with 
its melodious rhythm, sonorous periods, and felicitous 
blending of Saxon and Romance synonyms, has power- 
fully affected the character of our speech, and enriched 
it with a variety of beautiful and impressive phraseo- 
logical combinations. 

Ben Jon son, the friend and contemporary of Shaks- 
pere, endeavoured to graft upon the English drama the 
forms of classic art ; Terence and Seneca were the 
models to which he desired to assimilate the bounding 
spirit of the English tongue. But it is especially as a 
linguistic reformer that Jonson is entitled to the respect 
and gratitude of subsequent generations. LHis "English 
Grammar" was the first scientific and systematic treatise 
of the kind in the language, and its influence in defining 
and regulating the parts of speech was greater than that 



THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 179 

of any preceding or succeeding work.J The distinguished 
consideration in which Jonson was held by his contem- 
poraries, the deference and homage which were accorded 
to him in cultivated circles, gave him an almost dicta- 
torial power, as the arbiter of speech. That he left a 
deep impression upon the English of his time, may be 
inferred from the eulogies bestowed upon his memory, 
in w T hich he is represented as bringing the language 
from a state of confusion to melody and harmony. Some 
allowance must be made to the spirit of adulation in 
which such productions are generally conceived, but they 
are at least significant indications of the estimation in 
which Jonson was held as an expositor and a reformer 
of the vernacular tongue. 

The time would fail us to speak of the dramatists, 
poets, divines, travellers, scholars, philosophers and his- 
torians, whose varied productions contributed to the 
glory of this brilliant era. It is the great central point 
upon which all the diversified powers of the language 
w*ere concentrated ; the perennial fountain from which 
flow rich streams of intellectual nutriment ; and the pe- 
riod of our linguistic history which demands the most 
critical study, and the one that will most amply repay all 
the generous culture that may be bestowed upon it. 
The influence of the Elizabethan age is not bounded by 
the dominion of the English language ; its light is gone 
out into all the nations, realizing, with historic verity, 
the far-reaching vision of the poet Daniel : 

" And who, in time, knows whither we may vent 

The treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores 

This gain of our best glory shall be sent, 

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident, 
May come refined with accents that are ours ? 



180 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Or who can tell, for what great work in hand, 
The greatness of our style is now ordained ? 

W hat powers it shall bring in, what spirits command, 
What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained, 

What mischief it may powerfully withstand, 
And what fair ends may thereby be attained ? " * 

Note. — The possessive its. — It is during the Elizabethan era that 
the possessive form its first occurs in the written English language. 
It had probably existed long before in the current speech. It did 
not occur in the Authorized Version of the Scriptures, where Ms, 
thereof, supply its place, though it was subsequently interpolated 
(1653) ; Leviticus xxv. 5. It is found nine times in Shakspere, sev- 
eral times in Milton. The first example of its use is in Florio's 
" World of Words," 1598. The word passed through a variety of 
fortunes before its rights were generally conceded. The present 
use is the last of three distinct phases through which the language 
passed in regard to the word in about sixty years. First, " we 
have Ms serving for both masculine and neuter ; secondly, we have 
Ms restricted to the masculine, and the neuter left with scarcely any 
recognized form at all ; thirdly, we have the defect of the second 
stage remedied by the frank adoption of the heretofore rej ected its." 
Sometimes the occasion for its employment is avoided altogether ; 
especially is this the case in Shakspere. The very idea which we 
convey by the word its rarely occurs in his works, and it has been 
remarked that its adoption has changed not only our style of expres- 
sion, but even our manner of thinking. Its appears to have been 
firmly established in the written speech by the time of the Restora- 
tion, 1660. 

Our awkward participial construction, is being done, etc., has 
passed through a series of processes somewhat analogous to those of 
its; sometimes approved, but oftener repudiated; sometimes 
avoided, as was its, and its place supplied by in process of, it has 
steadily encroached, and is now, I fear, hopelessly engrafted upon 
the language. 

* These lines of Daniel's were written before the English race had 
acquired an extended foothold in the Western world. We are " the 
heirs of this augury." 






CHAPTEE XXII. 

THE TRANSLATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 

The Authorized Version of the Scriptures now in use 
among all English-speaking Protestants was executed 
by command of King James I. of England, being com- 
menced in 1607 and completed and published in 1611. 
Its relations to the English language are more impor- 
tant than those of any other work, and no other Euro- 
pean version, except perhaps that of Luther, has exer- 
cised so great an influence upon the character of the 
language to which it belongs. In the first place, the 
English people were more thoroughly imbued with the 
essential principles of the Reformation than any other 
European nation, and among them the Bible acquired a 
more extended circulation than in other lands. Again, 
the great theological and political issues which grew out 
of the Reformation, were protracted longer in England 
than elsewhere. From the year 1611, the present ver- 
sion of the Scriptures was appealed to as the supreme 
arbiter in all controverted religious and civil questions. 
From the accession of Elizabeth, but more especially 
from the accession of her successor, until the arbitrary 
enactments which characterized the earlier years of 
Charles II.'s reign suppressed for a time the religious 
liberties of England, the highest interests which affected 
man's welfare in this present life, and his happiness in 



182 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LAXGUAGE. 

that which is to come, were present to the mind of every 
reflecting Englishman as points to be determined at his 
own peril and by the light drawn from the inspired 
volume. Hence, it constituted a part of the intellectual 
and moral wealth of the English people, and it incorpo- 
rated itself with their speech to a greater extent than 
any other book had ever done. Notwithstanding the 
objections urged against particular features of the trans- 
lation by the advocates of either side in theological con- 
troversy, its excellence soon secured its general accept- 
ance, and it has maintained, for two hundred and fifty 
years, the preeminence as the purest and most luminous 
exposition of the genius and beauty of our tongue. 

It is a prevalent misapprehension that the English of 
the Authorized Version represents the actual condition 
of the speech as it existed in the reign of James I. On 
the contrary, it does not represent any particular phase 
of the language, or any definite period of its develop- 
ment, but it is a judicious and discriminating collection 
of all those forms of expression that are best adapted to 
the communication of religious truth which the language 
then contained, or which it had contained throughout 
the different stages of its history. We have learned that 
the dialect of Scripture is not subject to those essential 
changes of form and structure which have affected the 
secular speech. Its sacred idioms, its hallowed forms, 
seem to acquire, in a measure, the immutability of the 
truths which are treasured up in them. Hence, we dis- 
cover that the dialect of Revelation has remained with- 
out essential modification, so that Wycliffe and Tyndale 
would recognize in our version principally an expansion 
and a recension of their own labours, and in reading the 
inspired volume we are listening almost to the same 



THE TRANSLATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 183 

accents that were uttered by Tyndale three hundred and 
fifty years ago. 

"Wycliffe is to be regarded as the founder of our sacred 
dialect, while Tyndale imparted to it that finish and per- 
fection which so admirably adapt it to the communica- 
tion of spiritual truth. Above all others the genius and 
spirit of Tyndale are impressed upon our version, and its 
generic excellence is in large measure attributable to the 
thorough appreciation of the power and beauty of his 
own tongue which distinguished this truly great man, 
the most illustrious, and perhaps the most gifted, of the 
English reformers. The translators of 1611 contem- 
plated merely a revision of the labours of their prede- 
cessors, and it is to be regretted that their excellent pre- 
face is so generally omitted. From this may readily be 
seen the extent of their indebtedness to preceding ver- 
sions. a ¥e never thought," say they, "that we should 
need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a 
bad one a good one ; but to make a good one better, or, 
out of many good ones, one principal good one, not to 
be excepted against. That hath been our endeavour, 
that our marke." Their translation embodied all the 
excellencies of previous versions, from Wycliffe's to the 
Bishop's Bible, which was in general use at the time 
that the translators of the Authorized Version entered 
upon their labours. 

The most important changes which have taken place 
in the language of the Scriptures since 1611, are the 
following : many words of Latin derivation were then 
used in their primitive sense. Since that time they 
have assumed metaphorical or special significations. 
Such words are convenient, conversation, describe, de- 
nounce, offend, instant, prevent. Some native words 



184 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

and phrases have lost their original import, e. g., " take 
no thought." Some archaic forms and ancient inflec- 
tions are retained, " all to brake " (Judges ix. 53), broke 
entirely, ail to pieces, all to is an intensive form. " Fell 
downe, and all to dasht herself for woe ; " * hosm, 
hose (Daniel iii. 21). This inflection in en, according 
to Ben Jonson, disappeared in the time of Henry Till. 
The possessive pronominal form, its, did not occur in 
the Translation of 1611. It was interpolated in 1653, 
Leviticus xxv. 5. Of it ; thereof, his are substituted. 
The form " its w is first found in the written language 
in 1598— Florio's " World of Words." The old infini- 
tive prefix for to, occurs in several places, "for to see" 
" for to be done : " also the participial noun with the 
preposition a (at) ; " the ark was a preparing," " the 
people fell a lusting." The adverb is used for the ad- 
jective : " thine often infirmities," where we would now 
write frequent or many infirmities. This accords with 
Elizabethan usage. Compare Shakspere, " seldom 
pleasure." The pluperfect indicative is used with the 
force of the pluperfect potential. " I had fainted (I 
would have fainted) unless I had believed to see the 
goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." Some 
words occur which are now obsolete, f ear, to plough ; 
(arare), Genesis xlv. 6, Deuteronomy xxi. 4 ; wist, wot, 
etc. Dialectic terms are sometimes employed : fat for 
vat, Joel iii. 13. 



* Sackville's Induction. 

f The number of words in the Bible, which are now obsolete, or 
which are used in the United States with meanings different from 
those that they formerly had., is estimated by Marsh at two hun- 
dred and fifty. In the Old Testament, fi>e thousand six hundred 
and forty two words are employed. 



CHAPTEE XXIII. 

THE CHANGES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE SINCE THE 
ELIZABETHAN ERA. 

During the Elizabethan era, the English language 
acquired a degree of stability which it had never at- 
tained in the previous ages of its history. Its latent 
capabilities were developed, and its varied powers were 
perfected by the most splendid culture that has ever 
been bestowed upon any speech. Its mutations in the 
succeeding periods have not been so violent nor so es- 
sential as those which preceded the age of Elizabeth. 
But as language is the most sympathetic of all the pro- 
ductions of the human mind, reflecting with unerring 
accuracy the fortunes of those who use it, and receiving 
a deep impression from the peculiar conditions, and the 
new relations, introduced by each succeeding era in its 
j history, so every speech is liable to changes, in vocabu- 
I lary, in style, and in pronunciation. It possesses a 
( power of adjustment, a faculty of adaptation to the de- 
mands which are made upon its resources, by the 
extension of mechanical pursuits, the diffusion of scien- 
tific knowledge, the rise of artistic tastes, the progress of 
invention and discovery. Hence every language is sub- 
ject to perpetual change and fluctuation. The language 
of Shakspere and Ben Jonson would be inadequate for 
the purposes of our complex civilization ; the vocabulary 



186 HISTORY OF THE EKGLISH LANGUAGE. 

of the present day would be in great measure unintelli- 
gible to Sidney, Spenser, or Bacon. 

The changes in the English tongue since the days of 
Elizabeth are such as would naturally be produced by 
the altered relations and the new conditions of society, 
during the course of two hundred and fifty years. The 
most potent agencies of change have been the vast ex- 
tension of commercial and maritime enterprise, the 
growth of mechanical pursuits, and the consequent in- 
crease of mechanical appliances, the rise of the physical 
sciences, each of which has brought with it its special 
nomenclature, the development and cultivation of aes- 
thetic tastes, the wonderful expansion of human inge- 
nuity in every department of scientific effort, the multi- 
plication of domestic comforts, the advance of social 
graces and refinements, contact and association with 
foreign nations, foreign wars, conquest, and coloniza- 
tion. 

From the combined action of so many causes, the 
vocabulary of the English language has been more than 
doubled since the Elizabethan era. In the days of 
Shakspere, the written speech probably did not contain 
more than forty thousand or forty-five thousand words. 
Our largest dictionaries, as Webster's and Worcester's, 
have more than one hundred thousand. * 

win addition to the changes in the vocabulary, there 
have been important alterations in the styles of compo- 
sition, in the signification and accentuation of words. * In 
Elizabethan times, the involved and complicated sen- 
tences of the Romans constituted the favourite model of 

* This estimate does not include our provincialisms, slang phrases, 
and local forms, which are part of the language, though excluded 
from the written speech. They may be estimated at many thousands. 



THE CHANGES SLtfCE THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 187 

authors. But notwithstanding their long periods, they 
used as few words as possible ; conciseness and brevity 
of expression were sometimes carried so far as almost to 
produce obscurity. In modern times this process is re- 
versed ; we have shorter and more compact sentences 
than the Elizabethan writers, but we employ more words 
than they. Words of Latin and Greek derivation then 
retained their primitive signification. They have either 
passed over into metaphorical senses, or have been ap- 
propriated to the expression of special shades of mean- 
ing. In the conception of the Elizabethans there exist- 
ed a closer connection between the word and the thing, 
than in later ages. The materialistic or realistic element 
was then much more powerful ; since that time the lan- 
guage has become more symbolic and spiritual. Many 
words which were then in perfectly good repute, have 
become obsolete, or have descended to provincial usage.* 
This may be illustrated by comparing the provincial- 
isms of America with the English of the Elizabethan 
age. Our accentual system has been essentially modi- 

* Notice the following list of words, which were at different 
periods reputable linguistic citizens. Having failed to keep pace 
with the general movement of the tongue, they have been passed 
by, and left to linger in remote localities, and among the humble 
and uneducated, who most zealously preserve the memories, the 
usages, and the accents of the past. Most of our provincialisms can 
be traced to the retention of ancient usage. 

Argufy, for argue ; allers, for always ; crap, for crop ; belike, per- 
haps ; blubber, to weep ; Beaumont and Fletcher, and by Spenser ; 
beant, be not ; afeard, once as common as afraid ; ax, for ask, used 
by Chaucer, Gower, Wy cliff e, and Tyndale; bin, for been ; a few 
broth ; busted, for burst ; clodhopper ; fout for fought ; hadnt ought; 
haint ; het, for heat ; mo and moe, for more, Chaucer, Spenser, 
Shakspere ; mought, for might and must; used by Palgrave and 
Lydgate ; hit, for it, the common neuter of the A. S. personal pro- 



188 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

fied. The Gothic constituents of the language have 
vigourously asserted their rights, and the tendency to 
throw the accent as far as possible from the end of the 
word is constantly gaining ground. The insular pecu- 
liarities of English have displayed themselves very strik 
ingly in the pronunciation, which has lost, since the 
Elizabethan era, nearly all points of resemblance to the 
pronunciation of the kindred tongues, French, German.* 
The individuality and self-sustaining energy of the tongue 
have greatly increased. Many characteristic and ancient 
forms have disappeared ; the weak or regular verbs 
have made constant encroachments upon the strong or 
irregular form, and many of our most useful and ex- 
pressive Saxon preterites have become obsolete. This 
will be obvious to every reader of the English Bible, in 
which the old preterites are of frequent occurrence ; 
spake, brake, slang, etc. The process had commenced, 
however, long before Elizabethan times; as early as the 
Anglo-Saxon period, nearly every verb introduced into 
the language from foreign sources, takes the weak in- 
flection. This process commenced at a much earlier 
period. The parts of speech are now thoroughly ascer- 
tained and regulated ; then they were fluctuating and 

X 

noun lie ; think, for thing ; jawed, scolded ; cotched, caught; holp, 
for help ; consarn, concern ; his'n ; Hz, for rose ; knowed as how ; 
snub ; gull; dumpish. 

Many " Americanisms/' falsely so called, may be similarly ex- 
plained. They are merely words and phrases that have been per- 
petuated by the descendants of the English colonists in America, 
and in their day they were as reputable and as serviceable as those 
which have supplanted them. 

* In some portions of the United States, the orthoepy of the Eli- 
zabethan age is partially retained, as in Virginia, for example, 
where the broad Elizabethan a is often heard. 



THE CHANGES SINCE THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 189 

interchangeable. Conjunctions were then employed in 
profusion, giving to a sentence a stilted and constrained 
appearance. ]STow they are used less frequently, and 
with more discrimination. The language has been sub- 
jected to rigid grammatical discipline, and has gained 
much in the artistic graces of style ; it has advanced in 
precision, refinement, and perspicuity, while it has sacri- 
ficed much of its ancient pictorial power, its pliancy, and 
its artless melody. 



CHAPTEE XXIV. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE CLOSE OF THE ELIZA- 
BETHAN ERA TO THE RESTORATION, 1625-1660. 

The Elizabethan era embraces the period extending 
from about 1580 to the death of James in 1625. No 
other era in history presents so splendid an array of bril- 
liant names, illustrious in every department of linguistic 
effort. The light of this great age did not disappear, 
even in the comparative distraction and decadence that 
succeeded. So late as the middle of the Restoration, 
our higher literature preserved something of the spirit 
of the great dynasty which had passed away. Sir 
Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Cudworth, Cowley, 
Milton, the greatest masters of our language from the 
Restoration to the Revolution, were all born before 
the close of the reign of James I. and Charles I. The 
chief excellence of Elizabethan English, however, is 
properly to be referred to the period over which we have 
already passed. The reign of Charles L, it would seem, 
might have kept alive the spirit of the age which pre- 
ceded it, and the achievements of the tongue might have 
been as illustrious as in the days of Elizabeth or James. 
Charles was a person of scholarly sympathies and exqui- 
site tastes. The correctness of his judgment is mani- 
fested by his relish for the plays of Shakspere. But 
evil days were at hand. The political and religious dis- 



from 1625 to 1660. 191 

contents which had been repressed with difficulty in the 
preceding reigns now began to assume a formidable and 
well-defined character. The virulence of controversy, 
theological as well as political, began to divert the 
minds of men from the dignified and ennobling pur- 
suits of literature. Poetry, affected by the prevailing 
tendencies of the time, was gradually divided into schools 
or sects. In some the spirit of Spenser was perpe- 
tuated, and with the Spenserians Milton seems to have 
been identified. Ben Jonson lingered until 1637, the 
last of the great Elizabethans, and the man who in his 
day most powerfully influenced the tastes and style of 
his countrymen. There was no longer an accredited 
oracle of poesy; Shakspere had been dead more than 
twenty years, Milton had not attained his thirtieth year. 
The polemical works of Milton have survived the test 
of time, and they are as truly Mil tonic as his poetry. 
"As his poetry is unique in one portion of our language, 
so is his prose in another. It is prose of that old Eng- 
lish, or as some might say, of that old Gothic kind, 
which was in use ere men had given their days and 
nights to the study of Addison, and when it seemed as 
lawful that prose should come in the form of a brim- 
ming flood, or even of a broken cataract, "as in that of a 
trim and limpid rivulet." His style and syntax are 
thoroughly Latinized, and his vocabulary is pervaded by 
rare words of Latin coinage, used in their original im- 
port, and familiar only to the diligent student of our 
early literature. The earlier productions of his muse 
were perhaps the finest specimens of finished execution, 
artistic excellence, and exquisite discrimination in the 
| selection and application of words, that the language 
had thus far produced. The crowning glory of his 



192 HISTORY OF THE EKGLISH LANGUAGE. 

poetic career was reserved for the succeeding era, but the 
effusions of his youthful genius were not unworthy of 
the author of " Paradise Lost." 

Poetry assumed a diversity of form and character; it 
reflected the sentiments of opposing factions, and the 
political and religious affinities of the author. We have 
a profusion of verse, exhibiting a strange variety of 
styles, gay, luxuriant, austere, fantastic, classical, and 
native. In poetry, as in religion, the period under con- 
sideration appears to have been the golden age of con- 
trariety and diversity. The unsurpassed ballad of Suck- 
ling, and the graceful classicism of the English " Anac- 
reon," are found side by side with the devout strains of 
Herbert, the pure and limpid diction of Wither, and the 
dreamy allegory of the " Purple Island." The relations 
of England to France, brought about by the marriage of 
Charles I. to a French princess, led to the partial imita- 
tion of French models, and introduced some of that 
neatness and polished correctness which peculiarly dis- 
tinguish the productions of French art. This served to 
abate the extravagance of euphuism, which continued to 
infect our prose and poetry. 

The greater part of the prose written during the first 
half of the seventeenth century was theological or polit- 
ical. The controversies of Charles I.'s reign, respecting 
the nature and constitution of the Church, displayed 
a range and depth of theological and ecclesiastical eru- 
dition which succeeding ages have never surpassed, per- 
haps never equalled. The Confession of the West- 
minster Assembly (1643 to 1648-9) conclusively demon- 
strates that in all the loftier attributes of theological 
composition, the language had lost none of that vigour 



from 1625 to 1660. 193 

and energy of expression which it had acquired under 
the culture of Tyndale and Hooker. 

Much of the literature of this age is in pamphlet 
form,* and is marred by the resentments and acrimonies 
which are generated by civil dissensions and partisan 
strife. Hence, it discouraged the growth of refined 
composition, and rendered "zeal and confidence much 
more effectual aids to success than art or the graces of 
art." The popular element in the speech began to make 
its way into the written language ; provincialisms more 
frequently occur, and the distracted condition of the 
nation is reflected in the deliquescent state of the tongue. 
The theatres were closed by order of the Long Parlia- 
ment, and all 'dramatic amusements were rigourously 
proscribed by the zealous sectaries of Cromwell. 
Fanaticism and austerity did not fail to leave their 
colouring upon the current speech.f It is seen in the 
adoption of Old Testament phraseology and its common 
occurrence in daily usage : in the nasal tone, the sancti- 
monious drawl, which characterized the adherents of 
Cromwell. 

The reign of Charles, and the period of the Common- 
wealth and the Protectorate, notwithstanding their per- 
nicious tendencies, in some respects, produced beneficial 
results. The war of "broadsides" and tracts enlisted 
the interests of the masses ; the topics which they dis- 

* This was the great age of pamphlet literature in England ; 
nearly thirty thousand were published between the close of the year 
1640 and the Restoration, 1660. 

t " During the usurpation (of Cromwell), such an infusion of en- 
thusiastic jargon prevailed in every writing as was not shaken off in 
many years alter. "Swift's Works, Vol. IX., p. 349. 

9 



194 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

cussed had direct reference to their political and social 
welfare ; their style was simple, though devoid of ele- 
gance, and they possessed the elements of popularity 
without the forms and attractions of art. Their general 
dissemination must have affected very sensibly the 
structure of the language, by producing greater sim- 
plicity of style and departing somewhat from the com- 
plicated sentences that distinguished the prose composi- 
tions of that age. The process of simplification was 
facilitated by the civil wars, the commingling of men 
of different social grades and various degrees of intelli- 
gence, representing sections, still comparatively isolated 
and exhibiting marked differences of speech. 

The era under consideration thus served to prepare 
the way for the more modern and concise style of writing 
that grew up during the Restoration, and which ulti- 
mately supplanted the sonorous periods of Taylor, Mil- 
ton, and Clarendon. 



CHAPTEE XXV. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DURING THE RESTORATION. 

1660-1685. 

The events that were in progress during the period 
whose history we have been considering, facilitated the 
introduction of greater changes in the language, that 
occurred during the reign of Charles II. The era of 
the Restoration was a period of severe trial to the lan- 
guage of England, as well as a period of important 
changes in the structure of the speech and in the style 
and manner of composition. It is during this era that 
we trace the beginning of the modern and concise 
style of prose writing which in the end succeeded the 
Latinized periods that constituted the favourite model of 
Elizabethan times. This new mode of composition, 
which was developed during the reign of Charles II., 
was in the succeeding age remodelled, and invested with 
a purer character, by the diligent labours of Addison and 
Iteele. Hence the Restoration marks an important 
jpoch in our linguistic history — the commencement of 
its modern form. 

But this result was not accomplished without a season 
of adversity, through which the language was obliged to 
>ass in consequence of the political and social conditions 



196 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

of the age. Notwithstanding the comparatively dis- 
tracted condition of our prose and poetry during the 
preceding era, they had, at least in spirit and in style, 
been native and idiomatic. They were the product 
of English genius, not repressed, but only modified, by 
alien influences. 

But there was a serious change in this respect. 
Charles II. returned to govern a people with w T hose 
tastes he had no sympathy, and of whose literature he 
had no appreciation. His foreign converse had rendered 
him in disposition and literary predilection a French- 
man. His court was tainted with the levity and frivol-, 
ity of French manners, and addicted to the usages and 
customs acquired by long residence in foreign lands. 
Rhyme was introduced into plays to gratify the French 
tastes of. Charles, and thus a fatal blow was inflicted 
upon the English drama, then just beginning to recover 
from the austere tyranny of Puritanism. Under the 
influence of Rochester, Otway, Sedley, Lee, Etherege, 
Wycherley, dramatic, as well as other poetry, descended 
to a degree of depravity which has consigned much 
of it to oblivion, notwithstanding the pathetic power 
and constructive skill which it occasionally displays. 
The drama of the Restoration attained its height in 
Dryden, who sacrificed the nobler powers of his intellect 
to the prevailing licentiousness that had affected the 
more fashionable and polished classes of society. The 
national taste was vicious to the last degree. The master- 
pieces of Elizabethan eloquence and poetry were con- 
signed to the tranquil slumbers of the upper shelf. Their 
style was crude and antique, the vocabulary uncouth 
and obsolete. The reading public of that age felt them- 
selves separated from the language of Spenser and 



DURING THE RESTORATION. 197 

Shakspere, by a wider gulf than that which divides the 
educated Englishman from Langlande or Chaucer. This 
may be inferred from the modernizations of Chaucer by 
Dryden, from various passages in his writings, and from 
frequent notices of Shakspere's plays in the diary of 
Pepys. 

A new condition of society introduced a new manner 
of thinking and an altered style of writing. The state- 
liness of ancient ceremonial, and the dignity of ancient 
manners, faded away amid the laxity and frivolity that 
were dominant at the court of Charles II. These novel 
conditions of society could not fail to affect very sen- 
sibly the character and constitution of the language. 
The gay cavaliers of the Restoration abjured everything 
in speech and in demeanour that savoured of Puritanical 
cant or sanctimonious phraseology. The prevalence of 
French tastes, and the attempted assimilation of man- 
ners and language to French models, coincided with the 
violent reaction against the sombre sway of Puritanism, 
and essentially facilitated its progress. From the com- 
bined action of these causes, we discover an altered style 
of conversation, and a new fashion of writing, which pre- 
sent a striking contrast to the biblical phraseology and 
the drawling accent of the Puritan, as well as a marked 
antithesis to the stately periods of Hooker, of Taylor, and 
Milton. We begin to trace the commencement of that 
process of abridgment, and abbreviation of words and 
syllables, that corruption of form, which distinguish the 
Restoration as one of the great epochs of phonetic decay 
in the history of the English tongue. Nor did these 
influences affect the structure of the speech alone. 
Words originally pure and elevated in their import 
assumed a noxious significance; the language ac- 



198 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

quired some of that malignity and virulence which we 
have already indicated as characteristic of the Norman 
era. 

There are several most instructive passages in Swift 
(a writer who has left us many valuable reflections upon 
the language of his time) relating to this subject, which 
we introduce to illustrate the remarks just made in 
respect to the condition of the language during the Res- 
toration. After speaking of the " enthusiastic jargon " 
which prevailed during the Commonwealth and Pro- 
tectorate, he continues as follows : " To this succeeded 
the licentiousness which entered with the Restoration, 
and, from infecting our religion and morals, fell to cor- 
rupt our language, which last was not likely to be much 
improved by those who at this time made up the court 
of King Charles II., either such who had followed him 
in his banishment, or who had been- altogether con- 
versant in the dialect of those fanatical times ; or young 
men who had been educated in the same country ; so 
that the court, which used to be the standard of pro- 
priety and correctness of speech, w T as then, and I think 
has ever since continued, the worst school in England 
for that accomplishment. The consequence of this de- 
fect upon our language may appear from the plays and 
other compositions written for entertainment within 
fifty years past; filled with a succession of affected 
phrases and new, conceited words, either borrowed from 
the current style of the court, or from those who, under 
the character of men of wit and fashion, pretended to 
give the law. There is another set of men who have 
contributed very much to the spoiling of the English 
tongue, I mean the poets from the time of the Resto- 
ration. These gentlemen, although they could not but 



DUKISTG THE KESTORATIOK. 199 

be sensible bow much our language was already over- 
stocked with monosyllables, yet to save time and pains 
introduced that barbarous custom of abbreviating words 
to fit them to the measure of their verses, and this they 
have frequently done so very injudiciously, as to form 
such harsh, unharmonious sounds, that none but a north- 
ern ear could endure ; they have joined the most obdu- 
rate consonant with one intervening vowel, only to 
shorten a syllable ; and their taste in time became so 
depraved, that what was at first a poetical license, not 
to be justified, they made their choice, alleging that the 
words, pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid. 
This was a pretence to take up the same custom in prose, 
so that most of the books we see now-a-days, are full of 
these manglings and abbreviations." 

These " manglings " and " abbreviations," of which 
Swift speaks, probably grew up in gay and fashionable 
circles. Their general circulation in those classes of 
society which were the patrons of poets and dramatists, 
affords a sufficient explanation of their introduction into 
the written speech. In all these movements we may 
perceive the process of transition, from the complex syn- 
tactical structure of Elizabethan times, to the concise and 
rounded periods of Addison, the energetic and per- 
spicuous diction of Steele. The Restoration was the era 
of transmutation from the language of the 16th and 17th 
centuries, to the distinctively modern form which it 
acquired during the earlier decades of the 18th. The 
phonetic corruption and disintegration to which the 
language was exposed during the reign of Charles II., 
resulted in the breaking down of the stately proportions 
of our speech ; it experienced a revolution in form and 
character somewhat analogous to that which was accom- 



200 HISTORY OF THE EKGLISH LANGUAGE. 

plishing in the moral and intellectual constitution of the 
nation that spoke it. But in the midst -of prevailing 
corruption the glory of the language was displayed in 
undimmed lustre in John Milton, who " constitutes an 
era by himself." It was during this period also, that 
Barrow produced his admirable sermons; Butler his 
"Hudibras," which has largely affected the character of 
current English ; Bunyan his inimitable allegory, in 
which are exhibited, to the full extent, the resources 
and the richness of the Saxon element in our speech; 
and that Waller revived the echo of long-gone melodies 
by his additions to the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. 
The brilliant triumphs of Congreve's dramatic genius 
belong to the succeeding era. 

In his two grand Epics, Milton enriched our speech 
with the varied graces of classic art; he reveals the 
primitive import of many of the vocables derived from 
the treasuries of antiquity, and adorns our tongue with 
many felicitous embellishments drawn froiji the speech 
of Athens and of Rome. His blank verse rises to a cli- 
max that no other poet has attained; his syntactical order 
exhibits the loftiest excellence that can be reached by 
skilful collocation ; if the order of arrangement is in- 
fringed, the spell of his poetry is broken, the charm 
vanishes, and it relapses into languid and monotonous 
prose. In him the spirit of Chaucer and of Spenser 
was kept alive ; he was the lineal heir of that great dy- 
nasty of whom almost every memorial had fallen into 
oblivion.* 

In the succeeding chapters we shall trace the process 
by which the novel and imperfect style that had sprung 

* Milton employs about 8,000 words. 



DURING THE RESTORATION. 201 

up under the auspices of a corrupt court, and under the 
influence of French models, was recast and made the 
basis of our present prose style by the wits and critics 
of Queen Anne's reign.* 

* During the Restoration, the English language received many- 
words from the French, also some from the Spanish, as desperado, 
reformatio, etc. 

9* 



CIIAPTEE XXYI. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE CLOSE OF THE ERA 
OF THE RESTORATION TO THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN 
ANNE, 1685-1702. 

Nothing is more difficult than to define by precise 
chronological arrangement the fluctuations or mutations 
that characterize the history of every language. All 
such divisions must be to a certain extent arbitrary, as 
well as artificial. The most that can be accomplished, 
is to approximate with tolerable correctness to those al- 
most impalpable boundaries, at which a language passes 
from one phase of existence into another, from its 
creative to its reflective stage, or from its synthetic to 
its analytic form. 

The greater part of the period included in the century 
that extends from the Revolution of 1688 to the death 
of Dr. Johnson, is distinguished by the existence of cer- 
tain predominant characteristics, that began to be devel- 
oped in the language during the era of the Restoration. 
These distinctive traits continued until towards the 
closing decades of the eighteenth century, at times ap- 
pearing in greater vigour and excellence than at others, 
and again existing side by side with other influences, 
but still manifesting their presence and their power 
during the greater portion of the period embraced within 
the limits of the present and the succeeding chapter. 
The comparative uniformity of character that is im- 



from 1685 to 1702. 203 

pressed upon this era of our linguistic history, has in- 
duced us to consider it as one period (comprehending, 
for convenience of treatment, two divisions), exhibiting 
in the main essentials a general resemblance, and at the 
same time redeemed from unvarying monotony by cer- 
tain deviations from the principal channels through 
which the language and the literature flowed. 

The period under review is designated by historians 
of our language and literature, as the critical, the arti- 
ficial, or the reflective era, in order to distinguish it from 
the Elizabethan, which is the great epoch of creative or 
iiriaginative power. Such a transition is in perfect ac 
cordance with the natural development of all languages. 
Every literature, in its earliest phases, is distinguished 
by the absolute dominion of the creative or imaginative 
element. But as the luxuriant fancy of childhood 
gradually fades away before the austere realities of ma- 
turer years, so the sway of imagination yields to those 
calm and reflective faculties that are called into action 
when the gravity and earnestness of manhood succeed 
to the fervid glow of youthful enthusiasm. In the pre- 
sent instance, it becomes us to trace the special causes 
by whose action the language acquired the distinctive 
features that were impressed upon it during the critical 
or reflective age. 

The Eevolution of 1688 found the language of England 
in essentially the same condition in which the Resto- 
ration had left it ; nor was it sufficient to extirpate the 
deep-seated taint that had infected almost every phase 
of our prose and poetry. But it ushered in the dawn of 
a salutary change, and it marks the development of that 
critical and regulative faculty beginning to mani- 
fest itself in the English mind, which, coinciding in 



204 HISTORY OE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

spirit with powerful foreign influences, now brought to 
bear upon it, constituted, for about a century, a deter- 
mining element in nearly all the linguistic productions 
of English genius. 

We have seen that the eifects of French influence 
upon our language during the Restoration tended to 
stimulate the prevailing corruption, to furnish new 
models of depravity, and to intensify the sentiment of 
revolt against everything that recalled the sway of the 
Commonwealth and the Protectorate. But with the 
advent of the Revolution we trace the beginning of a 
new era in the history of the English intellect, and a new 
era in the form and character of French influence. Let 
us endeavour to discover the mode in which these two 
tendencies, the one native, and the other foreign, co- 
operated and combined, so that by the influence of their 
united action, the critical age was developed and per- 
fected. 

In the first place, the Revolution is the period at which 
criticism first established itself as a modifying element in 
English politics and in English literature. J The Revolu- 
tion itself was a criticism and a settlement of constitutional 
issues, a manly and successful attempt to fix in precise 
terms and definite propositions, and to establish on a 
legal basis, the rights and liberties of England. In every 
phase of the nation's life, the action of the same critical 
principle is clearly discernible.* But in the character of 
the literature, it is most conspicuously exhibited, as may 
be illustrated by contrasting the two poets who may be 
regarded as the highest types of the creative or Eliza- 
bethan, and the critical or Revolution period. " This kind 

* North British Review, March, 1869. 



prom 1685 to 1702. 205 

of index," says an admirable writer, u is peculiarly sig- 
nificant, because men of genius instinctively reflect, if 
they do not even anticipate, the foremost intellectual 
tendencies of their own time. In his early years, we 
find the fervid imagination of Shakspere, the type of 
this first period, engaged upon his Venus and Adonis ; 
Pope, the type of the second period, in his teens reading 
Boileau, and enriching his Essay on Criticism with the 
treasures of literary wisdom, blended with the shrewd 
observations of his penetrating intellect. The creative 
age, the age of great and vigourous productions in prose 
and poetry, had passed away. Instead of these, critical 
editions of Shakspere and the other English poets were 
undertaken for the first time, as well as dissertations 
upon their beauties and defects, and critical theories of 
poetry and literature in general. It is true that these 
theories were often one-sided, superficial, and the rules 
prescribed for estimating the intellectual monarchs of 
the preceding age, utterly inadequate and even absurd. 
But it must be remembered, to the credit of the artificial 
age, that while its criticism is narrow, cold, and hyper- 
critical, diligent effort was made to establish correct 
principles of judgment in every department of intellect- 
ual effort, and important results were attained in history, 
philosophy, and political science." * 

The impulse communicated to the regulative or critical 
faculty by the Bevolution, reflected itself in the char- 
acter of the English language for nearly a century, and 
constitutes its determining and informing element. 
Thus we find that the critical restriction and refinement 



*North British Beview, March, 1869.— Revolutions in the Queen's 
English. 



206 HISTOKY OP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

of the language, its circumscription within some definite 
limit, was the dominant idea of English writers, from 
the days of Dryden, who witnessed its beginning, and 
who was an ardent advocate of the schemfe, to the days 
of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who saw its close, and whose 
Dictionary, published in 1755, may be regarded as a 
partial realization of the plan.* All homely and simple 

* One of the distinctive characteristics of the critical age is the 
titter inability of its authors and critics to appreciate the excellencies 
and the grandeur of the creative school. There are numerous al- 
lusions to Shakspere's plays in Pepys' Diary, in nearly all of which 
he speaks of them not merely with disparagement, but even with 
contempt. Addison did not include Shakspere in his enumeration of 
English poets, 1694 ; in 1721, Shakspere's Works were only in their 
fifth (5th) edition, and the copies of that edition published twelve 
years .before were sufficient for the public taste. " Lucilius," says 
Gildon, " was the incorrect idol of Roman times ; Shakspere of ours." 
" There is not one," says another of his critics, " in all his works 
that can be excused by nature or by reason." " There is a mean- 
ing," says Rymer, " in the neighing of a horse ; in the growling of a 
mastiff there is a lively expression, and may I say, more humanity, 
than many times in the tragical flights of Shakspere." While 
Shakspere was at this low ebb, and was regarded by thousands of 
persons of taste and culture, as little more than an uncouth, unedu- 
cated genius, no less a person than Alexander Pope became his 
editor. Whatever may have been his qualifications for the task, no 
one could do more to secure for the great poet a wide circle of admirers 
and intelligent readers. But even when supported by the charm of 
Pope's name, the publication of his works was deemed a doubtful 
speculation. Only seven hundred and fifty copies were printed, and 
of these a part could not be sold until after a reduction of the price, 
from six guineas to sixteen shillings. It is probable that even this 
could not have been accomplished, had not Pope undertaken to edit 
them. His comments were confined principally to verbal criticism, 
characteristic of the spirit of his age. The comparatively low re- 
pute into which Shakspere had fallen, was owing in great measure 
to the prevalence of French influence, and the preference for French 
and classic models. 



fkom 1685 to 1702. 207 

phraseology was to be excluded from the vocabulary of 
poetry. Serious poetry, argued the critics of that age, 
ought to reject such common and familiar terms as man, 
woman, cup, coat, bed, wine, and to substitute such ele- 
gant and delicately chosen expressions as alcove, fair, 
goblet, purple, swain, tide, vest. Dryden seems to have 
contemplated the establishment of a Central Academy, 
invested with dictatorial power, such as that which had 
polished the vocabulary and impoverished the resources 
of the French tongue, and we find that Swift addressed 
a letter to the Lord Treasurer, Oxford, suggesting that 
" as a member of the government he should take some 
means to ascertain and fix the language for ever, after 
such alterations are made in it as shall be thought re- 
quisite." It was not the design of Swift to exclude new 
words from the language, but to retain and preserve all 
such terms as should receive the sanction of the proposed 
Academy. 

In all these movements we discern the action of the 
native genius, assuming a critical form, stimulated by 
French influence and cooperating harmoniously with it. 

In 1673 Boileau (1636-1711) published his " Art of 
Poetry," which exerted an immediate influence upon the 
style of composition in England as well as in France. 
Boileau, the friend of Moliere, was the first to attack 
directly that " bel esprit " which Moliere had ridiculed. 
" He stood up boldly in defence of good sense." " Tout 
-doit tendre au bon sens," he said. His writings mark 
the decline of Italian influence in France, from which 
some of her greatest writers had not been entirely ex- 
empt, while others were completely subjected to its 
sway. The style which Boileau assailed was that of the 
Precieuses and the grammarians, which was rapidly 



208 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

falling into disrepute, from its innate weakness. The 
power of his satire soon completed its destruction, and 
he was immediately acknowledged as the great oracle 
and expounder of the canons of literary criticism. It 
was to the classic models of Greek and Roman literature 
that Boileau and his school looked for exemplars of ele- 
gance and perfection ; it was by their conformity to the 
writers of ancient Rome that the writers of France were 
to be judged. This was the " touchstone'' by which all 
their productions were to be tested. Nor was this an 
ill-founded or arbitrary canon of criticism. It is from 
the Latin that the French tongue has inherited many of 
its excellencies, and the rigid adherence to rule, the 
logical consistency and precision, that distinguished the 
cultivated speech of Rome, are strikingly perpetuated in 
its Langue D'Oyl descendant. The example set by 
Boileau and his followers soon extended itself to Eng- 
land, where it coincided with those reflective and regu- 
lative faculties which the Revolution had called into 
action, and imparted a new stimulus to critical inquiry 
into literary styles and forms of composition. 

Rapin, Bossu, Dacier, Fontenelle, who like Boileau, 
looked to the ancients as the great standard of taste and 
excellence, had their advocates and representatives in 
England. Horace's "Art of Poetry" was translated into 
verse by the Earl of Roscommon ; it was imitated by 
Oldham; while Boileau's "Art of Poetry," translated by 
Sir William Soame, a friend of Dry den's, was not pub- 
lished until it had received many touches from the hand 
of Dryden, who, in the preface to his plays, had proved 
himself the first of English critics, the most thoroughly 
independent and English in spirit. Yet even he cites 
in the preface to his conversion of " Paradise Lost " 



from 1685 to 1702. 209 

into an opera, as authorities in literature, " the greatest 
in his age, Boileau and Rapin, the latter of which alone 
is sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the 
rules of writing." The influence of Boileau and his 
school thus became as potent in England as in France. 
The change in the character of literary composition is 
distinctly perceptible in the altered style of Dryden 
after his "Annus Mirabilis? '* (1667.) Before that 
time he had produced all his rhyming tragedies, in 
which he deliberately followed the worst French models ; 
afterwards he produced his best plays, his satires, and 
his didactic poems. His play of " Tyrannic Love," was 
the last in which he adhered to the excesses and ex- 
travagancies of his French prototypes ; the salutary in- 
fluence of Boileau begins to manifest itself in the more 
elevated and dignified tone of his works. 

But if Dryden was subject to the sway of Boileau 
during the latter part of his career, f his lineal successor, 
Pope, was under his dominion during the whole of his 
literary history, and he has been termed, not inaptly, 
the " viceroy" of Boileau in England. He was thor- 
oughly imbued with the teachings of French criticism, 
and it was in great measure due to his influence that 
these teachings so deeply impressed themselves upon the 
character of English literature during the eighteenth 
century. In him are reflected all the excellencies and 
defects of the critical era ; no man had a greater num- 
ber of imitators, and his poetry was, by general consent, 
the highest standard of scrupulous accuracy and finished 

* Morley's English Writers. 

f During the earlier part of his literary career, Dryden was under 
the influence of the metaphysical school of poets, Donne and 
Cowley. 



210 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

elegance, during the greater part of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. He was emphatically the representative of the 
artificial age, thoroughly in sympathy with its spirit, 
and the fitting exponent of its linguistic and intellectual 
tendencies. 

But while the critical age may be dated from the 
Revolution of 1688, while its essential characteristics 
are impressed upon the literary productions of the Eng- 
lish mind, until the later decades of the eighteenth 
century, it was during the reign of Queen Anne (1702- 
1714) that the distinctive features of the era attained 
their loftiest excellence. It was during this period that 
our literature acquired that centralized, conventional, 
and urban tone which characterized the contemporary 
literature of France ; it was then that eloquence assumed 
its modern form, that De Foe, the father of our popular 
literature, and one of the greatest names in the history 
of our language, established his " Review," * and that 
Steele, following the example of De Foe, founded that 
immortal series of periodicals which mark so important 
an epoch in our literary history, and whose influence 
upon our style of prose composition is perceptible in 
every sentence that we write. The true position and 
services of the refiners and critics of Anne's time, have 
often been misconceived and misinterpreted. The con- 
cise modern fashion of writing which had grown up 
during the Restoration, under the influences indicated 
in the preceding chapter, was tainted with the linguistic 
corruption which prevailed during that era. 

* De Foe's " Review " was established in 1704, five years in ad- 
vance of the " Tatler." His experiment probably suggested to 
Steele the plan of the " Tatler." De Foe founded our popular lit- 
erature ; Steele and Addison extended and improved it. 



fkom 1685 to 1702. 211 

It is true that a pure and noble prose style was slowly 
disentangling itself. The cumbrous periods of the 
Elizabethans had given way, between the Restoration 
and the accession of Queen Anne, to a more concise 
style of writing, which, beginning with Cowley, the 
metaphysical poet, was perpetuated and improved by a 
succession of prose writers in whom we trace a gradual 
approximation to the characteristic excellencies of Ad- 
disonian times. Cowley, Barrow, Tillotson, Temple, 
Halifax, Dryden, South, Sprat, Locke, and Shaftesbury, 
were the worthy precursors of our Augustan age. The 
last of these was the immediate forerunner of Addison, 
and laboured zealously for the culture and advancement 
of the language. Perhaps no one in this era, before the 
appearance of Addison, exercised a more decided influ- 
ence upon the fortunes of English letters. Notwith- 
standing the merits of these writers, the conciseness of 
Cowley, the elegant simplicity of Temple, the vigourous 
English of Dryden, and the classical graces of Shaftes- 
bury, much remained to be accomplished. The language 
was still seriously defective in harmony and precision : 
laxity, carelessness, and disregard of idiomatic proprie- 
ties, marred the compositions of the best authors. The 
outlines of our present prose style had been sketched, 
but the process was incomplete, and there was need of 
much skillful elimination, delicate polishing, and critical 
expansion. The spoken language retained the grossness 
of the preceding era. The conversational dialect in 
vogue in fashionable circles must have been corrupt and 
licentious to a degree of which we can form no adequate 
conception. In the u Polite Conversations" of Swift, 
we have a correct portraiture, drawn by the hand of a 
master and a contemporary, of the colloquial style that 



212 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

dates from the Restoration, and which continued to pre- 
vail at the time that Addison and Steele commenced 
their noble labours for refining and improving the 
mother tongue. A careful reading of these " Conver- 
sations" will reveal the fact, that many of the delicate 
repartees and polished jests, current in the better circles 
of that era, have since not only been excluded from the 
speech of reputable society, but have descended to the 
lowest degree of provincial and vulgar usage. 

Such was the general condition of the language at the 
commencement of the eighteenth century. Under the 
influence of Boileau, poetry had assumed a purer tone. 
This improvement in our poetic dialect was carried out 
to its perfection by Pope. 

But the style of prose composition was essentially 
defective, and needed a thorough reconstruction before 
prose could attain its exalted position as a determining 
element in English literature. We shall now see how 
this reform was effected. 






CHAPTEE XXYII. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FKOM THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN 
ANNE TO THE DEATH OF DR. JOHNSON. 1702-1784. 

The age of Queen Anne was preeminently the era of 
the critical expansion and refinement of the English 
tongue. The critical tendencies which had been de- 
veloped by the Revolution, and stimulated by the influ- 
ence of Boileau, attained their perfection in the graces 
of Addison, and the fastidious elegance of Pope. Steele 
and Swift were less subject to foreign influence ; they 
represent the native or popular element in our literature, 
at a time when the English mind was in a great degree 
controlled by external forces. They appear to have 
been thoroughly imbued with the spirit of our tongue, 
and while they did not ignore the graces of style, and 
were in some measure guided by the prevailing tendency 
of their age, they maintained, like their illustrious con- 
temporary, De Foe, a truly English character, which is 
rarely exhibited in the pages of Addison. This is evi- 
dent from Swift's zealous labours for the improvement 
of the language, from his " Letter to a Young Clergy- 
man," his characteristic delineation of the linguistic cor- 
ruptions that were current in his own day, his earnest 
endeavours to secure for the English language a recog- 
nized place in the system of education, and his appreci- 



214 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

ation of our elder literature,* which had fallen into 
disrepute since the Restoration. The same English 
traits are displayed in the nervous and idiomatic style of 
Steele, in his exposure of verbal corruption and phraseo- 
logical abuses, t and his graceful employment of purely 
Elizabethan constructions.^: It is in Steele and in Swift 
that we distinctly trace the movements of our tongue 
during the critical era, retaining its ancient freedom 
and pliancy, modified by exotic influences, though never 
yielding to their sway. It was Addison who was thor- 
oughly subjected to French influence. In his conti- 
nental tour he had seen Boileau and conversed with him, 
and during his entire career, he seems to have looked to 
the critics of France, and to the fountains of Greek and 
Roman genius, as the true sources of inspiration and 
of excellence. 

Addison occupies the same position in regard to prose 
style, which has been accorded to Pope as the acknowl- 
edged model of poetic excellence.^ His influence over 
succeeding generations was so great "that any thing 
which tended to form his style, modified, through him, 
the writings of almost all his successors throughout the 
century. He seems to have possessed the marvelous 
faculty of taking the good and rejecting the bad from 

*"The period wherein the English tongae received the greatest 
improvement, I take to commence with the reign of Queen Eliza- 
beth, and to conclude with the great Rebellion in 1642." This was 
the "barbarous age" that produced " old Spenser," as Addison 
styles hhn in his college poem, 1694. 

f Toiler, No. 12. 

X Spectator, No. 492. " As agreeably as any she in England." This 
is purely Elizabethan. I do not think it occurs in Addison. It is 
one of those slight but unmistakable touches which reveal the true 
spirit of an author. 



from 1702 to 1784. 215 

the works of his predecessors, and in him, the rough 
vigour of the old English writers was softened by the del- 
icacy and refinement of the modern French school. In 
his pure and polished style, we see this influence ex- 
hibited in its best form." * His conformity to French 
models extended the reputation of his works across the 
channel, at a time when English literature was almost 
unknown beyond the limits of the island. Many dis- 
tinguished foreigners were among the subscribers to his 
works. In his tragedy of Cato, he observed the unities 
of time and place which have bound up the French 
drama within circumscribed and arbitrary limits, thor- 
oughly opposed to the free and natural spirit of the 
Elizabethan school. Hence he received from Voltaire 
(who denounced Shakspere as a barbarian genius) the 
glowing tribute, " Monsieur Addison is the first 
Englishman who has made a reasonable tragedy." This 
of the nation that had produced Hamlet, Lear, and 
Macbeth ! 

The impress of Addison upon the language of his 
age and of the succeeding age was deeper than that of 
his greater contemporaries, and for the reason that he 
was in perfect accord with the dominant spirit of the 
era. Idiomatic in style, polished and perspicuous in 
diction, he was assimilated in sentiment and in taste to 
the masterpieces of antiquity, and to the critical canons 
of Boileau. The incomparable literature of Elizabethan 
times failed to excite his sympathy or to arouse his 
admiration ; he was devoid of appreciation of every- 
thing that could not be conformed to the standard of 

* Woods' " Reciprocal Influence of English and French Literature 
in the XVIII. Century." 



216 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

" good sense," and lie undertook to bring Milton to the 
attention of his countrymen by comparing him to Homer 
and Virgil, a mark of deference to the spirit of his 
age. 

In 1694, an undergraduate at Oxford, we find Addi- 
son, in a poem on English poets, written for a college 
friend, omitting the name of Shakspere, and speaking 
of Chaucer and Spenser in such terms as these : - 

" Old age lias rusted what the poet writ, 
Worn out his language, and obscured his wit, 
In vain he jests in his unpolished strain, 
And tries to make his readers laugh, in vain. 
Old Spenser next, warm with poetic rage, 
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age, 
But now the mystic tale that pleased of yore, 
Can charm an understanding age no more." 

Nor do his attainments in English philology, his ac- 
quaintance with the historical development and the 
structural peculiarities of his native tongue, appear to 
have been of a higher order. Thus, we find him ex- 
plaining the 's of the genitive or possessive case, as the 
" his or her of our ancestors," and writing " Ulysses his 
bow" for Ulysses's bow. Of the genitive sign 9 s, Ben 
Jonson, in the " barbarous age " that produced a Spenser 
and a Shakspere, had given a much more rational and 
satisfactory explanation. 

Among all the men of this time, perhaps no one con- 
tributed more efficiently to the establishment of a chaste 
and polished style than Bolingbroke. His exalted posi- 
tion among scholars and statesmen, the charms of his 
conversation, and the readiness as well as the finish of 
his eloquence, must have rendered him a model that all 
cultured circles strove to imitate. It is said that his 



from 1702 to 1734. 217 

ordinary utterances and impromptu speeches possessed 
all the rhythmical harmony and " golden cadence" that 
belong to painfully wrought periods, and which most 
men acquire by the assiduous culture of a lifetime. His 
conversation or his writings were rarely marred, even by 
trifling blemishes, and in an age during which correct- 
ness was much sought after and but little understood, 
he must have wielded a decided influence in forming 
and regulating the conversational dialect, as well as the 
style of writing of his cultivated contemporaries.* 

The English genius, modified but not repressed, is 
represented in Dry den, Steele, and Swift. - In Pope, 
Addison, and Bolingbroke, we witness the action of the 
native mind subjected to the sway of classic models and 
foreign canons of criticism, but even in its servitude re- 
taining something of the spirit of its original freedom. 
Wherein consists the excellence and the glory of these 
writers ? Not in original or creative power, for of this, 
except Swift, they possessed but little, and they seem 
rather to have avoided anything that bordered upon the 
sublime or lofty. ,Not in the extent or variety of their 
learning, for their attainments were, with few exceptions, 
lacking in accuracy and comprehensiveness, and there 
appear in every issue of the British Reviews articles 
surpassing in extent and diversity of knowledge any- 
thing that ever emanated from the pen of Steele or 
Addison. Their true merit consists in this: not that 
they invented or constructed a new style, but that they 
adopted the mode of writing which had come into 

* Some idea of Bolingbroke's popularity and influence as a writer 
may be formed from the fact that his contributions to the Crafts- 
man gave that journal a circulation far exceeding that of the Spec- 
tator. 



218 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

fashion during the Restoration, eliminated its offensive 
f eatures, infused into it a purer tone, and impressed upon 
it the essential characteristics of our present prose com- 
position. They banished, in great measure, phonetic 
corruption and obscenity from the colloquial dialect, and 
gradually dispelled that lingering connection which still 
subsisted in the public mind between purity and auster- 
ity, between virtue and fanaticism. 

Such was the task that they accomplished, and they 
performed it thoroughly. Their vocabulary was culled 
with fastidious and painful diligence, homely words and 
phraseology were rejected, the more concise and polished 
Latin or Romance terms were preferred to their ener- 
getic Saxon equivalents, their periods were constructed 
with supreme regard to symmetry and harmonious ar- 
rangement; external grace, beauty of form were the 
highest excellence to which the critical taste aspired. 

Let us not misconceive the true character of this era, 
nor be blinded to its imperfections by the traditional 
lustre which envelops the name of Addison. Let us 
not indulge the delusion that the critical taste resulted 
in the perfecting of style, either written or colloquial. 
The adverse testimonies are too numerous to admit im- 
peachment.* The conversational dialect of this age was 
blemished by phonetic corruptions, marred by gross and 
widely prevailing profanity, and disfigured by affecta- 
tions as grotesque as those which characterized the worst 
stages of euphuism. It was against these abuses that 
the powers of the critical school were, in a great meas- 
ure, directed, and it is in these respects that their labours 
were attended with most salutary results. The conver- 

* Swift, Steele. 



from 1702 to 1784. 219 

sational style even of the educated was pervaded by in- 
accuracies of expression, and Dr. King (16S5-1763), an 
illustrious scholar of the last century, informs us that in 
all his associations with the men of his generation, he 
had met but three who expressed themselves with such 
purity and elegance that their conversation, if committed 
to writing, would possess the attractions of a finished and 
cultivated style. These were Bishop Atterbury, Dr. 
Gower, Provost of "Worcester College, and Dr. Sam. 
Johnson. Ko regard was paid to the systematic study 
of English in schools, no attention to the cultivation of 
pure English style ; treatises on English grammar appear 
to have been almost unknown. Affectation of French 
phrases, introduced by the Continental wars, seems to 
have prevailed ; the want of training in pulpit elocution 
was more common then even than now ; pedantry, and 
the absence of "the least conception of a style," consti- 
tuted the bane of the clergy ; the absence of accuracy 
and fluency of expression was a distinguishing charac- 
teristic of the age."* Much of this internal disorder is 
veiled from our gaze by the time-honoured glory that is 
associated with the names of Addison and Pope, and by 
the delusive splendour that gilds the Augustan age of 
Anne. The reputation of this era rests principally upon 
its praiseworthy efforts to eradicate the linguistic corrup- 
tions of a preceding period, and in its placing upon a 
firm and enduring basis our present prose style. 
In these respects its influence has been productive 
of most beneficial results. But the entire era is 
marked by its adherence to conventional usages ; 
its theory of language was conventional, its criticism 

* Spectator, 353. Tatler, 70, 165, 234. Swift's " Letter to a Young 
Clergyman." Dr. King's "Anecdotes of his own Time." 



220 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

was often superficial and circumscribed by artificial 
limits. In the popular literature founded by De Foe, 
in the productions of the great English novelists, 
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, the bounding 
spirit of the English tongue and the unchecked vigour 
of the English mind are kept alive ; in the notes of 
Thomson, the preluding strains of Goldsmith, the pol- 
ished compositions of Gray, the glowing verses of Col- 
lins, the graceful periods of Hawkesworth, the revival 
of our ballad poetry by the publication of "Percy's 
Reliques," we have occasional intimations of the glory 
that was to be revealed. But these deviations from the 
main current of the literature did not at once arrest 
those peculiar tendencies which had been so deeply im- 
pressed upon it during the preceding era, and other 
agencies, more potent in their nature, and more efficient 
in their action, were to be called into service ere should 
be broken the magic spell with which Addison and Pope 
had bound our prose and poetry. No one, even of the 
great historical triumvirate of the eighteenth century, 
can be regarded as a model of pure English style, simple 
and unaffected, "elegant, but not ostentatious." The 
style of Hume is marred by Scotticisms; that of Rob- 
ertson and Gibbon by a pompous diction and a Latin- 
ized phraseology. With the rise of Cowper, we have 
the first decided indication that the school of Dryden 
and Pope was hastening to its setting, and with the 
death of Dr. Johnson the dismal uniformity of conven- 
tionalism begins to be dispelled. 

In the concluding chapter we shall briefly trace the 
action of those agencies by whose influence the spirit of 
Elizabethan times was revived in full vigour, and an 
epoch in our linguistic history ushered in which blended 



from 1702 to 1784. 221 

the excellencies of the creative school with the softer 
graces of a reflective age, producing a combination 
which almost rivalled the splendour of the Virgin 
Queen's brilliant reign. 






CHAPTEE XXYIIT. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FROM THE DEATH OF DE. SAMUEL 
JOHNSON (1784) TO THE CLOSE OF THE GEORGIAN ERA 

(1830). 

The death of Dr. Johnson marks an event of the 
greatest importance in our linguistic history. It was the 
end of dictatorship, and "King Samuel" has had no 
acknowledged successor upon the throne of English litera- 
ture. But it foreshadowed an event of infinitely greater 
importance than the mere downfall of literary autocracy. 
No writer, perhaps, was ever more thoroughly the ex- 
ponent of his age, the embodiment of its conventional 
spirit, and its deference to ancient precedent. No man 
ever wielded a more decided influence in moulding the 
style, and directing the intellectual efforts of his con- 
temporaries, and his diction, generally pompous, turgid, 
and thoroughly Latinized,* was the acknowledged stand- 
ard of excellence among the writers of his era, nor did it 
fail to affect the style of succeeding generations. The 
coldly classical tastes of Dr. Johnson, his diffident and 
cautious estimate of Shakspere, are too well known to 
require comment. Hence, when he fell, conventional- 
ism lost its ablest and most influential champion. This 
event coincided with the development of those mighty 



* Dr. Johnson's style was in great measure modelled upon that 
of Sir Thos. Browne, whose Latinisms are worthy of careful study. 



from 1784 to 1830. 223 

political conflicts which were soon to transform the 
character of European society, annihilate ancient pre- 
scription, efface the vestiges of feudalism, create new 
modes of thought, new systems of philosophy, and dis- 
pel the dreary formality which had marked the intel- 
lectual creations of the eighteenth century.** 

Every literature derives its form and colouring from 
the spirit of the era which evokes it to life ; it is " the 
artistic expression in w^ords, of what men think and 
feel." The style of every age has its clearly defined 
characteristics, impressing upon it a strong individuality, 
and distinguishing it from the style of succeeding or 
preceding eras. Each of these peculiar styles is de- 
veloped by certain political and social conditions, and 
moulded in accordance with the prevailing tastes of the 
period. There was a style created by the Reformation m 
the sixteenth century ; there was another formed during 
the Restoration, and perfected during the age of Anne ; 
this style was expanded, and invested with a nobler tone 
and character, by the stimulus which the* French Revo- 
lution imparted to every phase of linguistic and literary 
effort. Convulsing the depths of European society, it 
undermined the barriers of venerable tradition, dispel- 
ling the accumulations of long established prejudices and 
absurd veneration for antiquity. Isolation and pro- 
scription began to fade away before the advent of gener- 
ous tolerance, enlightened sympathy, increasing appreci- 
ation of the true ideal in art, and genuine appreciation 
of nature. The true standard of excellence was no 
longer sought in mere external grace, obsequious defer- 
ence to ancient prototypes, and foreign models. The 
spirit and character of the nineteenth century are, in 
every essential respect, a revolt against the dominant 



224 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

principles and established traditions of the eighteenth, a 
perfect antithesis to its conventional and superficial ten- 
dencies, a return from the purely formal to the investi- 
gation of the inner life; from the form to the spirit, 
from the outward to the inward. 

This distinguishing feature of the present century is 
conspicuously displayed in every manifestation of its in- 
tellectual life ; in the marvellous expansion of the phy- 
sical sciences, in the splendid developments of linguistic 
science, which is based in great measure upon the inter- 
nal resemblances of speech, in the brilliant generaliza- 
tions of Cuvier, and the discovery of Grimm's law, in 
all of which the application of the same principle is ex- 
hibited in its grandeur and diversity. Every phase of 
intellectual effort participated in the great reaction that 
dates from the closing decades of the eighteenth century; 
poesy was transformed, philosophy was reconstructed, 
eloquence assumed a nobler tone, the discovery of San- 
skrit opened up vast fields of linguistic enterprise, and 
placed upon an enduring basis the magnificent science " 
of comparative Philology. One day was as a thousand 
years in the growth of the human mind. These dis- 
tinguishing characteristics of the century have power- 
fully impressed themselves upon its literary productions, 
and have infused into them a depth of conception, a 
comprehensiveness, and a degree of originality, far sur- 
passing the most delicately wrought creations of the pre- 
ceding century. The gorgeous eloquence of Burke, 
assuming a richer colouring with the flight of declining 
years, adorned the dialect of oratory with a diversity of 
phraseological combinations, many of ^hich have passed 
from the confines of rhetoric, and have enriched the ex- 
uberant affluence of the current speech. The sweet 



from: 1784 to 1830. 225 

strains of Cowper, breathing the spirit of earnest piety, 
and pervaded by an originality of style and sentiment 
to which our literature had long been a stranger, clearly 
announced the dawn of a new era in our own linguistic 
history. Compared w 7 ith any of his predecessors, he is 
what we may call a natural poet. " He broke through 
conventional forms and usages in a manner more dar- 
ing than any English poet before him had done, at least 
since the genius of Pope had bound in its spell the 
rhythm of English poetry." 

The three great revivals in our literature were in the 
main effected by the civil and religious convulsions of 
England and of Europe at the time, and at each of these 
grand awakenings the impulse seems to have been com- 
municated by a foreign literature, which had developed 
new life and vigour. In the age of Elizabeth, the inspira- 
tion was caught from the literature of Italy ; during the 
reign of Queen Anne from that of France ; in the present 
period, from that of Germany. 

Our last great period, extending over half a century 
from the appearance of Cowper and Burns, is without a 
parallel in our linguistic history, if we except the age 
of Elizabeth. In comparing the creations of these two 
periods, we discover, in the poetical productions of the 
former, greater license, and at the same time greater 
flexibility, than in those of the latter ; but in some essen- 
tial respects our more recent poetry is justly entitled to 
the preference. It is not defaced by the conceits of 
euphuism, and it is generally more symmetrical and 
consistent. In form and sentiment, it is often strikingly 
assimilated to the style of our ancient poesy. It consti- 
tutes one of the preeminent excellencies of this last 
great period, that it exhibits the genius and spirit of the 



226 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

creative era, tempered by the gentler graces of the criti- 
cal age. 

In all that pertains to grace of structure, the poetry of 
the nineteenth century may fairly claim the preference, 
notwithstanding the numerous passages of incomparable 
excellence in the dramas of Shakspere. In elaborate 
execution, harmonious and elegant versification, some of 
the poets of the earlier part of the nineteenth century 
have never been surpassed. Cowper, Keats, Shelley, 
Byron, Scott, Coleridge, Moore, Campbell, Wordsworth, 
present an array of poetic genius but little lower than 
the bright cluster that gilded the u glorious reign of 
great Elizabeth." The exquisite perception of natu- 
ral loveliness, the rich vocabulary, that distinguish 
the poetry of Wordsworth ; the rare verbal discrimina- 
tion, Spenserian fancy, and Platonic tenderness, that 
reign throughout the pages of Coleridge ; the dulcet 
strains of Keats, imbued with the very soul of poesy, 
established their right of succession, as the lineal heirs 
of Chaucer, of Shakspere, and Milton. Under the in- 
fluence of these great masters, the poetic dialect was 
again enriched by a copious revival of Anglo-Saxon 
words ; the nervous diction of our elder poets and think- 
ers was called into requisition ; familiar and homely 
phrases were freely admitted into the vocabulary of 
poetry, which now lost its urban and conventional chai- 
acter ; the ancient fountains of the speech were again ex- 
plored ; the process of dialectic regeneration was again 
vigourously at work, and much of the buried and for- 
gotten wealth of our language was reclaimed ; the 
Elizabethan masters were studied with interest ; imita- 
tions of their style were not unfrequent, and the merits 
of Shakspere were at last recognized and appreciated. 



from 1784 to 1830. 227 

By the close of the Georgian era (1830), the poetic 
spirit seemed to have spent its mightiest energies, and 
by a transition familiar in the history of every language, 
the supremacy began gradually to revert to prose, which 
during the Victorian age has maintained the ascendency. 
Macaulay and De Quincey attained the same brilliant 
distinction in prose composition that Shelley, Byron, 
and Coleridge had won in the domain of poesy, and 
the present poet laureate is the only worthy repre- 
sentative of that illustrious throng which cast so bright 
a glow over the closing years of the eighteenth, and the 
first decades of the nineteenth century. Since the close 
of the Georgian era there have doubtless been some 
essential changes in the language, but they will be. more 
distinctly perceptible to succeeding generations than to 
our own. They do not therefore fall properly within 
the scope of this history, and must be reserved for 
future consideration and discussion. 



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